Citation

Phung VLH, Ueda K, Kasaoka S, Seposo X, Tasmin S, Yonemochi S, Phosri A, Honda A, Takano H, Michikawa T, Nitta H. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2018; 15(2): e15020307.

Affiliation

Center for Health and Environmental Risk Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan. nitta@nies.go.jp.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph15020307

PMID

29425190

Abstract

Short-term health effects of ambient PM2.5 have been established with numerous studies, but evidence in Asian countries is limited. This study aimed to investigate the short-term effects of PM2.5 on acute health outcomes, particularly all-cause, cardiovascular, respiratory, cerebrovascular and neuropsychological outcomes. We utilized daily emergency ambulance dispatches (EAD) data from eight Japanese cities (2007-2011). Statistical analyses included two stages: (1) City-level generalized linear model with Poisson distribution; (2) Random-effects meta-analysis in pooling city-specific effect estimates. Lag patterns were explored using (1) unconstrained-distributed lags (lag 0 to lag 7) and (2) average lags (lag: 0-1, 0-3, 0-5, 0-7). In all-cause EAD, significant increases were observed in both shorter lag (lag 0: 1.24% (95% CI: 0.92, 1.56)) and average lag 0-1 (0.64% (95% CI: 0.23, 1.06)). Increases of 1.88% and 1.48% in respiratory and neuropsychological EAD outcomes, respectively, were observed at lag 0 per 10 µg/m³ increase in PM2.5. While respiratory outcomes demonstrated significant average effects, no significant effect was observed for cardiovascular outcomes. Meanwhile, an inverse association was observed in cerebrovascular outcomes. In this study, we observed that effects of PM2.5 on all-cause, respiratory and neuropsychological EAD were acute, with average effects not exceeding 3 days prior to EAD onset.

Language: en

Keywords

air pollution; ambient PM2.5; emergency ambulance dispatches; short-term exposure