The relationship between changes in daily air pollution and hospitalizations in Perth, Australia 1992–1998: A case-crossover study

Abstract

A case-crossover study was undertaken to investigate the relationship between daily air pollutant concentrations and daily hospitalizations for selected disease categories in Perth, Western Australia. Daily measurements of particles (measured by nephelometry and PM2.5), photochemical oxidants (measured as ozone), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and carbon monoxide (CO) concentrations were obtained from 1992 to 1998 via a metropolitan network of monitoring stations. Daily PM2.5 concentrations were estimated using monitored data, modelling and interpolation. Hospital morbidity data for respiratory, cardiovascular (CVD), gastrointestinal (GI) diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD) excluding asthma; pneumonia/influenza diseases; and asthma were obtained and categorized into all ages, less than 15 years and greater than 65 years. Gastrointestinal morbidity was used as a control disease. The data were analyzed using conditional logistic regression. The results showed a small number of significant associations for daily changes in particle concentrations, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide for the respiratory diseases, CODP, pneumonia, asthma and CVD hospitalizations. Changes in ozone concentrations were not significantly associated with any disease outcomes. These data provide useful information on the potential health impacts of air pollution in an airshed with very low sulphur dioxide concentrations and lower nitrogen dioxide concentrations commonly found in many other cities.

Multifactorial airborne exposures and respiratory hospital admissions — The example of Santiago de Chile

“…Some authors described significant increases of numbers of hospital admissions (Luginaah et al, 2005;Zanobetti and Schwartz, 2006). Other authors found small but significant effects of CO on respiratory hospitalizations (Fusco et al, 2001;Hinwood et al, 2006;Sauerzapf et al, 2009), could also not see significant effects (Fung et al, 2006), or detected protecting effects of CO for respiratory tract infections at lower concentration levels (Tian et al, 2013).…”

Tracking Associations Between Ambient Ozone and Asthma-Related Emergency Department Visits Using Case-Crossover Analysis

“…The case-crossover design has been applied in numerous studies to investigate the acute effects of air pollution, including mortality, 13 cardiovascular events, 14-33 and respiratory outcomes. 24,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40] We constructed time-stratified, 41 casecrossover datasets, using 28-day strata. Within a stratum, each case event (an ED visit) was matched to exactly three referent times matched on the same day of the week: that is, at ±7, ±14, and ±21 days.…”

Effects of weather types on hospital admissions for respiratory diseases in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain

“…An association between daily ozone levels and respiratory symptoms has been reported (Romieu et al, 1996;Rabinovitch et al, 2004). Nevertheless, some authors have failed to note a significant relationship between ozone levels and morbidity (Atkinson et al, 1999;Farhat et al, 2005;Hinwood et al, 2006). Such differences are probably due to geographic reasons, although they may also be linked to the type of methodology employed.…”