Lung function changes in wildland firefighters working at prescribed burns

Abstract

Context: Although decline in lung function across workshift has been observed in wildland firefighters, measurements have been restricted to days when they worked at fires. Consequently, such results could have been confounded by normal circadian variation associated with lung function.

Objectives: We investigated the across-shift changes in lung function of wildland firefighters, and the effect of cumulative exposure on lung function during the burn season.

Materials and Methods: We measured forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV₁), forced expiratory flow from 25% to 75% of FVC (FEF_25–75), and peak expiratory flow (PEF) of wildland firefighters before and after their workshifts. In all, 501 pre-shift and 488 post-shift measurements were collected over 22 prescribed burn days and 43 non-burn days from 24 non-smoking wildland firefighters during the dormant winter burn seasons of 2003 and 2004. We compared changes in the spirometry measures across the workshift on burn days to those observed on non-burn days. We also assessed the effect of cumulative exposure during the burn season on the spirometry measures.

Results: There were no significant differences in the across workshift changes on burn days compared to those on non-burn days for all the spirometry measures. However, for a given point in time during the season, each additional day of exposure was estimated to be associated with declines of 24 ml in pre-shift FVC and 24 ml in pre-shift FEV₁ (p <0.01).

Discussion and Conclusion: Cumulative exposure to woodsmoke was associated with slight decrements in lung function among the wildland firefighters.

Keywords::

• Wildland firefighters
• prescribed burns
• spirometry
• forced vital capacity
• forced expiratory volume in 1 second

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge the support of John Blake, Gary Achtemeier, Dan Shea, Jason Demas, Mark Frizzel, Paul Linse and Jeff Prevey of the United States Forest Service and David Macintosh of the Environmental Resource Management Inc., Needham, MA. We also acknowledge the contributions of William Beckett, MD of Mount Auburn Hospital, Cambridge, MA.

Declaration of interest

Funding was provided by the Department of Energy-Savannah River Operations Office through the U.S. Forest Service Savannah River under Interagency Agreement DE-AI09-00SR22188.