TY  - JOUR
AU  - Szyszkowicz, Mieczyslaw
AU  - de Angelis, Nicholas
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/02/11
TI  - Urban Air Pollution and Emergency Department Visits for Cardiac and Respiratory Diseases
JO  - Advances in Environmental and Engineering Research
SP  - 005
VL  - 03
IS  - 01
AB  - Air pollution affects various aspects of human health. Here, the associations between the number of emergency department visits for circulatory and respiratory problems and ambient air pollution in Toronto, Canada, in the period between April 2004 and December 2015 were studied. The health data were linked with urban air pollution data and weather factors. The conditional Poisson regression models were built for 18 strata (sex, age group, season), 8 exposure factors (air pollutants, indexes), and their 15 lags (0-14 days). Circulatory problems: the associations were intensified in the cold period (October - March) and were associated with the air quality health index (AQHI). The estimated relative risks for all patients in the cold period, for an increase of the AQHI by 1, at lags 0, 1, and 2 were 1.017 and 95% confidence interval (1.010, 1.024), 1.014 (1.007, 1.021), and 1.009 (1.002, 1.016). Respiratory problems: the analogous results for ozone and its increase by 12.8 ppb at lags 3, 4, and 5 were 1.052 (1.033, 1.161), 1.039 (1.020, 1.121), and 1.027 (1.008, 1.082). It was observed that exposure to certain air pollutants (nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and the AQHI index) are associated with increased emergency department visits in both cardiac and respiratory health problems.
SN  - 2766-6190
UR  - https://doi.org/10.21926/aeer.2201005
DO  - 10.21926/aeer.2201005
ID  - Szyszkowicz2022
ER  -