Trends in Spatiotemporal Exposure to Air Pollutants and Adult Cardiovascular Emergency Room Visits in the Greater Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
In recent years, an increasing number of studies have used modeled data for exposure assessment in epidemiologic studies. Most of this literature utilizes aerosol optical depth (AOD) as the modeling method to address the spatiotemporal exposure of PM2.5 among the population, since AOD can only model the exposure level of particles. While taking into account gaseous pollutants, surface level spatiotemporal modeling is required. A paper using spatiotemporal modeling of both PM2.5 and ozone exposure revealed a higher variation of the exposure among the study population, and a stronger association between O3 and asthma hospitalization and emergency room visits in adults and children.
For the papers with multi-pollutants, authors often are only able to access and investigate two-pollutant models, e.g. PM2.5 and O3, i.e. the effect of one pollutant adjusted for the
other,12-16 while, very few have studied an additional two gaseous criteria pollutants: NO2
and SO2. These two pollutants were also related to CVD outcomes in population based studies,17-20 and possibly through the oxidative stress pathway. In this paper, we are interested in the effect of multiple pollutants on CVD ERV. Moreover, we want to test whether the effect of one pollutant exists after adjusting for other pollutants.
In this paper, we examined the acute association between four spatiotemporal modeled criteria air pollutants (PM2.5, O3, NO2 and SO2) and CVD emergency room visits in Allegheny County
from 1999-2011 using a case-crossover study design.
Epidemiol Open J. 2022; 7(1): 11-21. doi: 10.17140/EPOJ-7-128
