Particulate Air Pollution Standards and Morbidity and Mortality: Case Study

Greenbaum, Daniel S.; Bachmann, John; Krewski, Daniel; Samet, Jonathan M.; White, Ronald H.; Wyzga, Ronald E.

doi:10.1093/aje/154.12.s78

Cited by 38 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…[82][83][84] Much of the divisiveness was because of the public policy implications of finding substantive adverse health effects at low-to-moderate particle concentrations that were common to many communities throughout the United States. [85][86][87][88] After a lawsuit by the American Lung Association and a comprehensive review of the scientific literature, 89 in 1997, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) promulgated National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) designed to impose new regulatory limits on fine particulate pollution. 90 Legal challenges relating to the promulgation of these standards were filed by a large number of parties.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Health Effects of Fine Particulate Air Pollution: Lines that Connect

Pope

Dockery²

2006

Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association

5,598

3,159

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Efforts to understand and mitigate the health effects of particulate matter (PM) air pollution have a rich and interesting history. This review focuses on six substantial lines of research that have been pursued since 1997 that have helped elucidate our understanding about the effects of PM on human health. There has been substantial progress in the evaluation of PM health effects at different time-scales of exposure and in the exploration of the shape of the concentration-response function. There has also been emerging evidence of PM-related cardiovascular health effects and growing knowledge regarding interconnected general pathophysiological pathways that link PM exposure with cardiopulmonary morbidity and mortality. Despite important gaps in scientific knowledge and continued reasons for some skepticism, a comprehensive evaluation of the research findings provides persuasive evidence that exposure to fine particulate air pollution has adverse effects on cardiopulmonary health. Although much of this research has been motivated by environmental public health policy, these results have important scientific, medical, and public health implications that are broader than debates over legally mandated air quality standards.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Health Effects of Fine Particulate Air Pollution: Lines that Connect

Pope

Dockery²

2006

Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association

5,598

3,159

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“…Estimation of adverse health effects associated with ambient exposure to Particulate Matter (PM) constitutes one of the most interesting, recent case studies on the use of epidemiological evidence in public policy (Samet, 2000;Greenbaum et al, 2001). Under the Clean Air Act (Environmental Protection Agency, 1970), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is required: 1) to set National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for six "criteria" air pollutants at a level that protects the public's health (Environmental Protection Agency, 1996, and 2) to periodically review these standards in light of the accumulated scientific evidence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improved Semiparametric Time Series Models of Air Pollution and Mortality

Dominici

McDermott

Hastie

2004

Journal of the American Statistical Association

155

140

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In 2002, methodological issues around time series analyses of air pollution and health attracted the attention of the scientific community, policy makers, the press, and the diverse stakeholders concerned with air pollution. As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was finalizing its most recent review of epidemiological evidence on particulate matter air pollution (PM), statisticians and epidemiologists found that the S-Plus implementation of Generalized Additive Models (GAM) can overestimate effects of air pollution and understate statistical uncertainty in time series studies of air pollution and health. This discovery delayed the completion of the PM Criteria Document prepared as part of the review of the U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS), as the time-series findings were a critical component of the evidence. In addition, it raised concerns about the adequacy of current model formulations and their software implementations.In this paper we provide improvements in semi-parametric regression directly relevant to risk estimation in time series studies of air pollution. First, we introduce a closed form estimate of the asymptotically exact covariance matrix of the linear component of a GAM. To ease the implementation of these calculations, we develop the S package gam.exact, an extended version of gam.Use of gam.exact allows a more robust assessment of the statistical uncertainty of the estimated pollution coefficients. Second, we develop a bandwidth selection method to reduce confounding bias in the pollution-mortality relationship due to unmeasured time-varying factors such as season and influenza epidemics. Third, we introduce a conceptual framework to fully explore the sensitivity 1 of the air pollution risk estimates to model choice. We apply our methods to data of the National Mortality Morbidity Air Pollution Study (NMMAPS), which includes time series data from the 90 largest US cities for the period 1987-1994.

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“…Improved measurements of pollutant gases, particle size fractions, and sulfates were especially important in the 1987 and subsequent NAAQS reviews. Other analysts from the US Environmental Agency (EPA) and academe pioneered in the development of more sensitive statistical methods used in new and reexamined previous studies, to take fuller advantage of existing regulatory monitoring data as well as the growing Harvard data (Greenbaum et al, 2001). An explosion of scientific papers that began to emerge in the 1990s demonstrated…”

Section: Impact and Implications For Exposure Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Targeting the components most responsible for airborne particulate matter health risks

Lippmann

2010

J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol

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Particulate Air Pollution Standards and Morbidity and Mortality: Case Study

Cited by 38 publications

References 12 publications

Health Effects of Fine Particulate Air Pollution: Lines that Connect

Health Effects of Fine Particulate Air Pollution: Lines that Connect

Improved Semiparametric Time Series Models of Air Pollution and Mortality

Targeting the components most responsible for airborne particulate matter health risks

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