Health impacts and burden of disease attributed to long-term exposure to atmospheric PM₁₀/PM_2.5 in Karaj, Iran: effect of meteorological factors

ABSTRACT

There are sporadic researches on evaluating the health endpoints and burden of disease resulted from long-term exposure to atmospheric PM₁₀/PM_2.5by AirQ⁺ model in the world. Therefore, the aim of the current work was to evaluate the effect of PM₁₀/PM_2.5on health of residents in Karaj city, Iran using AirQ⁺. To this end, data on population, the baseline incidence rates of health outcomes in Karaj’s inhabitants, meteorological parameters and PM₁₀/PM_2.5concentrations (from 2012 to 2016) were obtained from governmental organisations.The correlation between the PM₁₀/PM_2.5levels and meteorological parameters in the research period were evaluated by statistical analysis using SPSS® 22 and R software. Finally, the health endpointsanddisease burden was estimated using WHO-approved AirQ⁺ software. The results of statistical correlation analysis indicated that PM_2.5/PM₁₀ are positively correlated with relative humidity and temperature (P < 0.05), but the negativelycorrelatedwithother two parameters (precipitation and wind speed) (P > 0.05). The quantitative risk assessment conducted by AirQ+ showed that all-cause deaths, the deaths from cerebrovascular disease (stroke), chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD), lung cancer (LC), ischaemic heart disease (IHD) and acute lower respiratory infection (ALRI) in periods of time 2012–2016wereestimated 3894, 1834, 124, 139, 2410 and 21 cases, respectively. On the other hand, PM10-attributable mortality from 2012 to 2016 were estimated 1619 cases. The findings obtained from of the regression correlation analysis relationship between PM_2.5 concentrations and the number of mortality revealed that by increasing 1 µg/m³in PM_2.5concentrations, about 14 cases will be added to the total deaths of Karaj city.

KEYWORDS:

• PM₁₀/PM_2.5
• long-term exposure
• AirQ⁺
• health impacts
• burden of disease
• Karaj

Acknowledgments

The authors received financial and technical support (Grant No.14965) for this research from Iran University of Medical Sciences. We would like to express our thanks to the Air Quality Control Company (AQCC) of Karaj for providing air pollutants concentration data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical considerations

The authors of this article have covered all the ethical points, including non-plagiarism, duplicate publishing, data distortion, and data creation in this article. This project has been registered in Iran University of Medical Sciences with the code of ethics of IR.IUMS.REC.1398.453.

Supplementary material

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