Fine Particulate Air Pollution and US County Life Expectancies
By C. Pope, M. Ezzati, D. Dockery, Abstr Act. New England Journal of Medicine, 2009
1,273 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Background Exposure to fine particulate matter air pollution has been associated with increased risk of cardiopulmonary and lung cancer morbidity and mortality, suggesting that sustained reductions in pollution exposure should result in improved life expectancy. This study directly evaluates changes in life expectancy associated with differential changes in fine particulate air pollution that occurred in the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s. Methods Life expectancy, socio-economic, and demographic data were compiled for 217 counties in the 51 U.S. metropolitan areas with matching fine particulate air pollution data for the late 1970s/early 1980s and the late 1990s/early 2000s. Regression models were used to estimate the association between reductions in pollution and changes in life expectancy, controlling for changes in socio-economic and demographic variables and for proxy indicators of cigarette smoking. Results A decrease of 10 μg/m3 of fine particulate concentration was associated with an estimated increase in life expectancy equal to 0.77 (SE = 0.17) years. The estimated effect of reduced pollution exposure on life expectancy was not highly sensitive to controlling for changes in socio-economic, demographic, and proxy smoking variables or to restricting observations to relatively large counties and central metro counties. The effect of reductions in air pollution on life expectancy in the study areas was as much as 18% of the overall increase. Conclusion Reducing exposure to ambient fine particulate matter air pollution contributed to significant and measurable improvements in life expectancy in the U.S.
Subfields: Health, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Physiology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04924db2ac112e437fcfe0f1e2885ac715303c9e
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Citations in the corpus
- Global Estimates of Ambient Fine Particulate Matter Concentrations from Satellite-Based Aerosol Optical Depth: Development and Application (2010, background): “Pope et al. (2009) estimated that a decrease of 10 µg/m3 in longterm PM2.”
- PEIR, the personal environmental impact report, as a platform for participatory sensing systems research (2009, background): “A recent study by [6] of data from the 1970’s - 1990’s for fifty-one major metropolitan areas in the United States demonstrates that a reduction to exposure of these kinds of particulates correlates with increased life expectancy.”
- Use of Satellite Observations for Long-Term Exposure Assessment of Global Concentrations of Fine Particulate Matter (2014, background): “5) is associated with morbidity and premature mortality (Dockery et al. 1993; Pope et al. 2009).”