Background: Recent studies have shown an association of short-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM) with transient increases in blood pressure (BP), but it is unclear whether long-term exposure has an effect on arterial BP and hypertension.Objectives: We investigated the cross-sectional association of residential long-term PM exposure with arterial BP and hypertension, taking short-term variations of PM and long-term road traffic noise exposure into account.Methods: We used baseline data (2000–2003) on 4,291 participants, 45–75 years of age, from the Heinz Nixdorf Recall Study, a population-based prospective cohort in Germany. Urban background exposure to PM with aerodynamic diameter ≤ 2.5 μm (PM2.5) and ≤ 10 μm (PM10) was assessed with a dispersion and chemistry transport model. We used generalized additive models, adjusting for short-term PM, meteorology, traffic proximity, and individual risk factors.Results: An interquartile increase in PM2.5 (2.4 μg/m3) was associated with estimated increases in mean systolic and diastolic BP of 1.4 mmHg [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.5, 2.3] and 0.9 mmHg (95% CI: 0.4, 1.4), respectively. The observed relationship was independent of long-term exposure to road traffic noise and robust to the inclusion of many potential confounders. Residential proximity to high traffic and traffic noise exposure showed a tendency toward higher BP and an elevated prevalence of hypertension.Conclusions: We found an association of long-term exposure to PM with increased arterial BP in a population-based sample. This finding supports our hypothesis that long-term PM exposure may promote atherosclerosis, with air-pollution–induced increases in BP being one possible biological pathway.
Our study shows a clear association of long-term exposure to PM(2.5) with atherosclerosis. This finding strengthens the hypothesized role of PM(2.5) as a risk factor for atherogenesis.
In this article we present SkePU 2, the next generation of the SkePU C++ skeleton programming framework for heterogeneous parallel systems. We critically examine the design and limitations of the SkePU 1 programming interface. We present a new, flexible and type-safe, interface for skeleton programming in SkePU 2, and a source-to-source transformation tool which knows about SkePU 2 constructs such as skeletons and user functions. We demonstrate how the source-to-source compiler transforms programs to enable efficient execution on parallel heterogeneous systems. We show how SkePU 2 enables new use-cases and applications by increasing the flexibility from SkePU 1, and how programming errors can be caught earlier and easier thanks to improved type safety. We propose a new skeleton, Call, unique in the sense that it does not impose any predefined skeleton structure and can encapsulate arbitrary user-defined multi-backend computations. We also discuss how the sourceto-source compiler can enable a new optimization opportunity by selecting among multiple user function specializations when building a parallel program. Finally, we show that the performance of our prototype SkePU 2 implementation closely matches that of SkePU 1.
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