1999 Volume 119 Issue 3 Pages 215-220
The number of patients prescribed medicine for allergies increased in May and September. Therefore, we suspected that the cause for the increase was pollen. Many kinds of pollen occur in Otaru, such as alder in April, Japanese black pine, white birch, acacia, larch in May, oak in June, and mugwort in September. The total number of pollen count of white birch was about 9 times that of mugwort, but the total number of patients prescribed Celestamine in the season of white birch pollen was about 0.8 times that of mugwort pollen. These results seen in Otaru differed from those in neighboring Sapporo. The coefficient of the correlation of the number of mugwort and white birch pollen and those of patients prescribed Celestamine were γ=0.304 and γ=0.766, respectively. We believe that making available information on pollen is very useful to improve the quality of life of patients.
