Citation

Chen R, Pan G, Zhang Y, Xu Q, Zeng G, Xu X, Chen B, Kan H. Sci. Total Environ. 2011; 409(23): 4923-4928.

Affiliation

School of Public Health, Key Lab of Public Health Safety of the Ministry of Education, Fudan University, Shanghai, China; G_RI(o)CE (Research Institute for the Changing Global Environment) and Fudan Tyndall Centre, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2011.08.029

PMID

21908017

Abstract

Ambient carbon monoxide (CO) is an air pollutant primarily generated by traffic. CO has been associated with increased mortality and morbidity in developed countries, but few studies have been conducted in Asian developing countries. In the China Air Pollution and Health Effects Study (CAPES), the short-term associations between ambient CO and daily mortality were examined in three Chinese cities: Shanghai, Anshan and Taiyuan. Poisson regression models incorporating natural spline smoothing functions were used to adjust for long-term and seasonal trend of mortality, as well as other time-varying covariates. Effect estimates were obtained for each city and then for the cities combined. In both individual-city and combined analysis, significant associations of CO with both total non-accidental and cardiovascular mortality were observed. In the combined analysis, a 1mg/m(3) increase of 2-day moving average concentrations of CO corresponded to 2.89% (95%CI: 1.68, 4.11) and 4.17% (95%CI: 2.66, 5.68) increase of total and cardiovascular mortality, respectively. CO was not significantly associated with respiratory mortality. Sensitivity analyses showed that our findings were generally insensitive to alternative model specifications. In conclusion, ambient CO was associated with increased risk of daily mortality in these three cities. Our findings suggest that the role of exposure to CO and other traffic-related air pollutants should be further investigated in China.

Language: en