Potential Role of Ultrafine Particles in Associations between Airborne Particle Mass and Cardiovascular Health

By Ralph J. Delfino, C. Sioutas, Shaista Malik. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2005

918 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Numerous epidemiologic time-series studies have shown generally consistent associations of cardiovascular hospital admissions and mortality with outdoor air pollution, particularly mass concentrations of particulate matter (PM) ≤2.5 or ≤10 μm in diameter (PM2.5, PM10). Panel studies with repeated measures have supported the time-series results showing associations between PM and risk of cardiac ischemia and arrhythmias, increased blood pressure, decreased heart rate variability, and increased circulating markers of inflammation and thrombosis. The causal components driving the PM associations remain to be identified. Epidemiologic data using pollutant gases and particle characteristics such as particle number concentration and elemental carbon have provided indirect evidence that products of fossil fuel combustion are important. Ultrafine particles < 0.1 μm (UFPs) dominate particle number concentrations and surface area and are therefore capable of carrying large concentrations of adsorbed or condensed toxic air pollutants. It is likely that redox-active components in UFPs from fossil fuel combustion reach cardiovascular target sites. High UFP exposures may lead to systemic inflammation through oxidative stress responses to reactive oxygen species and thereby promote the progression of atherosclerosis and precipitate acute cardiovascular responses ranging from increased blood pressure to myocardial infarction. The next steps in epidemiologic research are to identify more clearly the putative PM casual components and size fractions linked to their sources. To advance this, we discuss in a companion article (Sioutas C, Delfino RJ, Singh M. 2005. Environ Health Perspect 113:947–955) the need for and methods of UFP exposure assessment.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4da23c1cac8c049ecf8c0b263a94b130342ed42e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

1. Jing Meng
2. M. Lodovici
3. D. Griffin
4. K. Robbie
5. I. Pacheco
6. E. Bigagli
7. C. Buzea

Citations in the corpus

• Atmospheric Movement of Microorganisms in Clouds of Desert Dust and Implications for Human Health (2007, background): “adverse health effects via oxidative stress (47, 52, 263).”
• Oxidative Stress and Air Pollution Exposure (2011, background): “UFPs may be directly transported to the cardiac vasculature, where they can induce arrhythmias, reduce myocyte contractility, and decrease coronary blood flow [10, 68].”
• Nanomaterials and nanoparticles: Sources and toxicity (2007, background): “Several are comparatively general [18], [20], [30-32], while others address selected aspects of nanoparticles toxicology, such as: health effects of air pollution [33]; epidemiological reviews of exposure to particles [34]; epidemiological studies of cardiovascular effects of airborne particles [35]”
• Tracing Primary PM2.5 emissions via Chinese supply chains (2015, background): “5) affects visibility (Menon et al 2002, Huang et al 2006), the climate (Huang et al 2007, Bond et al 2013) and human health (Delfino et al 2005, Timonen et al 2005), creating the need to better understand the sources of PM2.”