The Association between Ambient Air Pollution and Daily Mortality in Beijing after the 2008 Olympics: A Time Series Study

Abstract

In recent decades, ambient air pollution has been an important public health issue in Beijing, but little is known about air pollution and health effects after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. We conduct a time-series analysis to evaluate associations between daily mortality (nonaccidental, cardiovascular and respiratory mortality) and the major air pollutants (carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter less than 10 µm in aerodynamic diameter) in Beijing during the two years (2009∼2010) after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. We used generalized additive model to analyze relationship between daily mortality and air pollution. In single air pollutant model with two-day moving average concentrations of the air pollutants, increase in their interquartile range (IQR) associated with percent increase in nonaccidental mortality, 2.55 percent [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.99, 3.11] for CO, 2.54 percent (95% CI: 2.00, 3.08) for NO2 and 1.80 percent (95% CI: 1.21, 2.40) for PM10, respectively; increases in the IQR of air pollutant concentrations associated with percent increase in cardiovascular mortality, 2.88 percent (95% CI: 2.10,3.65) for CO, 2.63 percent (95% CI: 1.87, 3.39) for NO2 and 1.72 percent (95% CI: 0.88, 2.55) for PM10, respectively; and increase in IQR of air pollutant concentrations associated with respiratory mortality, 2.39 percent (95% CI: 0.68, 4.09) for CO, 1.79 percent (95% CI: 0.11, 3.47) for NO2 and 2.07 percent (95% CI: 0.21, 3.92) for PM10, respectively. We used the principal component analysis to avoid collinearity of varied air pollutants. In addition, the association stratified by sex and age was also examined. Ambient air pollution remained a significant contributor to nonaccidental and cardiopulmonary mortalities in Beijing during 2009∼2010.

Has reducing fine particulate matter and ozone caused reduced mortality rates in the United States?

“…We tested lags of 1 to 3 years, as many previous studies suggest that reductions in PM2.5 and other pollutants lead to almost immediate reductions in mortality rates, for example, within as little as a few days, and certainly well within a year or two [18,22,47,48]. The Python Granger function grangercausalitytests provides P values for each of four separate test statistics (two based on the F distribution and two on the c 2 distribution), all of which yield closely similar results.…”

Fusing Observational, Satellite Remote Sensing and Air Quality Model Simulated Data to Estimate Spatiotemporal Variations of PM2.5 Exposure in China

“…Severe PM 2.5 pollution in China has attracted considerable public attention [10][11][12] and inspired numerous epidemiological studies to investigate the health effects of air pollution in China since 2013 [13][14][15][16][17][18]. Accurately assessing PM 2.5 exposure is critical for estimating its health risks in such epidemiological studies.…”

“…Accurately assessing PM 2.5 exposure is critical for estimating its health risks in such epidemiological studies. However, due to the limited number of ground monitors in China, previous studies generally ignored the spatial variation of PM 2.5 and assessed the ambient exposure uniformly using one monitor or averages of several monitors located within a city or a municipality [13][14][15][16], which causes exposure misclassification. Therefore, accurately estimating the fine-scale spatiotemporal variation of ground PM 2.5 may lay a foundation for future health-related studies of PM 2.5 in China.…”

Short-term effects of air pollution on daily mortality and years of life lost in Nanjing, China

“…Numerous time-series studies have evaluated the relationship between ambient air pollution and daily mortality counts in most Western countries (Katsouyanni et al, 1997;Dominici et al, 2005;Samoli et al, 2008;) and some large Chinese cities such as Beijing (Yang et al, 2013), Shanghai (Geng et al, 2013), Guangzhou (Yu et al, 2012), and Wuhan (Wong et al, 2010), and mostly detected positive associations between daily changes in air pollutant levels and daily mortality. The exposure-response relationships derived from these studies have provided valuable information for public health risk assessments of the health effects arising from exposure to ambient air pollution.…”