Cause-specific mortality and the extended effects of particulate pollution and temperature exposure.

Abstract

Air pollution exposure studies in the past decade have focused on acute (days) or long-term (years) effects. We present an analysis of medium-term (weeks to months) exposure effects of particulate pollution and temperature. We assessed the associations of particulate pollution (black smoke) and temperature with age-standardized daily mortality rates over 17 years in Dublin, Ireland, using a polynomial distributed lag model of both temperature and particulate air pollution simultaneously through 40 days after exposure. When only acute effects (3-day mean) were considered, we found total mortality increased by 0.4% for each 10-µg/m 3 increase in black smoke concentration. When deaths in the 40 days after exposure were considered, we found a 1.1% increase. For respiratory mortality, the estimated effect was 0.9% for acute exposures, but 3.6% for the extended follow-up. We found each increase in current-day temperature by 1°C was associated with a 0.4% increase in total mortality, whereas each decrease of 1°C was associated with a 2.6% increase in mortality in the following 40 days. For both temperature and pollution, the largest effects on cardiovascular mortality were observed immediately, whereas respiratory mortality was delayed and distributed over several weeks. These effects were two to three times greater than the acute effects reported in other studies, and approach the effects reported in longer-term survival studies. This analysis suggests that studies on the acute effects of air pollution have underestimated the total effects of temperature and particulate air pollution on mortality.

Health Effects of Fine Particulate Air Pollution: Lines that Connect

“…31,212 Studies using distributed lag models to evaluate associations from 5 to Յ60 days after exposure have been conducted using data from 10 U.S. cities, 213,214 European cities from the APHEA-2 project, 215,216 and Dublin. 217 In all of these analyses, the net PM-mortality effect was larger when time scales longer than a few days were used.…”

Statistical Analysis of Air Pollution Panel Studies: An Illustration

“…However, longitudinal models can incorporate other exposure measures, such as particular exposure lags, cumulative exposure, or different exposure components (see Section 4.1). Distributed lag exposure models can also be used (Schwartz 2000;Diggle, Heagerty, Liang, and Zeger 2002;Goodman, Dockery, and Clancy 2003). These models allow the health effects of air pollution to extend over time.…”

Establishing the Association between Quarterly/Seasonal Air Pollution Exposure and Asthma using Geospatial Approach

“…Exposure to common urban air pollutants has been linked to a wide range of adverse health outcomes including respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, asthma exacerbation, reduced lung function and premature death (U.S. EPA, 2006(U.S. EPA, , 2009. Over the past decade, many epidemiologic studies have demonstrated positive associations between air pollution and mortality (Levy et al, 2000;Goodman et al, 2004;Pope et al, 2004;Schwartz, 2004;Analitis et al, 2006). But, many questions regarding the effects of air pollution remain unanswered and overall the effects of air pollution have not been fully quantified.…”

“…Most of the studies of air pollution have used time-series analysis to relate daily asthma rates to daily air pollution levels for short-term associations between air pollution and health. A substantial number of epidemiological studies reported associations between mortality/morbidity with air pollution levels (Rosas et al, 1998;Dales et al, 2000;Levy et al, 2000;Chen et al, 2004;Goodman et al, 2004;Pope et al, 2004;Schwartz, 2004;Chang et al, 2005;Analitis et al, 2006;Dominici et al, 2006;Hinwood et al, 2006;Yang et al, 2007;Yang, 2008;Halonen et al, 2008;Chiu et al, 2009;Halonen et al, 2009;Belleudi, 2010;Hsieh et al, 2010;Gorai et al, 2014).…”