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Short-term associations between fine particulate air pollution and cardiovascular and respiratory mortality in 337 cities in Latin America
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Short-term associations between fine particulate air pollution and cardiovascular and respiratory mortality in 337 cities in Latin America

Nelson Gouveia, Jordan L. Rodriguez-Hernandez, Josiah L. Kephart, Ana Ortigoza, Ricardo Morales Betancourt, Jose Luis Texcalac Sangrador, Daniel A. Rodriguez, Ana V. Diez Roux, Brisa Sanchez, Goro Yamada, …
The Science of the total environment, v 920, 171073
10 Apr 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.171073
PMID: 38382618
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
url
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.171073View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Cardiovascular mortality Particulate matter Respiratory mortality Air Pollution
Ambient air pollution is a health concern in Latin America given its large urban population exposed to levels above recommended guidelines. Yet no studies have examined the mortality impact of air pollutants in the region across a wide range of cities. We assessed whether short-term levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) from modeled estimates, are associated with cardiovascular and respiratory mortality among adults in 337 cities from 9 Latin American countries. We compiled mortality, PM2.5 and temperature data for the period 2009–2015. For each city, we evaluated the association between monthly changes in PM2.5 and cardiovascular and respiratory mortality for sex and age subgroups using Poisson models, adjusted for seasonality, long-term trend, and temperature. To accommodate possibly different associations of mortality with PM2.5 by age, we included interaction terms between changes in PM2.5 and age in the models. We combined the city-specific estimates using a random effects meta-regression to obtain mortality relative risks for each sex and age group. We analyzed 3,026,861 and 1,222,623 cardiovascular and respiratory deaths, respectively, from a study population that represents 41 % of the total population of Latin America. We observed that a 10 μg/m3 increase in monthly PM2.5 is associated with an increase of 1.3 % (95 % confidence interval [CI], 0.4 to 2.2) in cardiovascular mortality and a 0.9 % increase (95 % CI -0.6 to 2.4) in respiratory mortality. Increases in mortality risk ranged between −0.5 % to 3.0 % across 6 sex-age groups, were larger in men, and demonstrated stronger associations with cardiovascular mortality as age increased. Socioeconomic, environmental and health contexts in Latin America are different than those present in higher income cities from which most evidence on air pollution impacts is drawn. Locally generated evidence constitutes a powerful instrument to engage civil society and help drive actions to mitigate and control ambient air pollution. [Display omitted] •Most evidence on health impacts of air pollution comes from high-income countries•We examined whether PM2.5 is associated with cause specific mortality in adults of 337 cities in 9 Latin American countries•A 10 μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 is associated with a 1.3% and a 0.9% increase in CVD and respiratory mortality respectively•Increases in mortality were larger in men and associations with cardiovascular mortality were stronger at older ages•Locally generated evidence can help drive actions to mitigate and control ambient air pollution in the region.

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17 Record Views
28 citations in Web of Science
23 citations in Scopus

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#3 Good Health and Well-Being
#11 Sustainable Cities and Communities

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Environmental Sciences
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