Personal exposure to household air pollution and lung function in rural Bangladesh: A population-based cross-sectional study

ABSTRACT

We assessed whether personal exposure to household air pollution [PM_2.5 and black carbon (BC)] is associated with lung functions (FEV₁, FVC, and their ratio) in non-smoking adults in rural Bangladesh. We measured personal exposure to PM_2.5 using gravimetric analysis of PM_2.5 mass and BC by reflectance measurement between April 2016 and June 2019. The average 24-hour PM_2.5 and BC concentration was 141.0μgm⁻³ and 13.8μgm⁻³ for females, and 91.7 μgm⁻³ and 10.1 μgm⁻³ for males, respectively. A 1 μgm⁻³ increase in PM_2.5 resulted in a 0.02 ml reduction in FEV₁, 0.43 ml reduction in FVC, and 0.004% reduction in FEV1/FVC. We also found a similar inverse relationship between BC and lung functions (9.6 ml decrease in FEV₁ and 18.5 ml decrease in FVC per 1μgm⁻³ increase in BC). A higher proportion of non-smoking biomass fuel users (50.1% of the females and 46.7% of the males) had restrictive patterns of lung function abnormalities, which need further exploration.

KEYWORDS:

• Household air pollution
• personal exposure
• particulate matter
• black carbon
• lung function
• spirometry

Acknowledgement

Research reported in this publication was supported by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health under the Global Environmental and Occupational health (GEOHealth) program (Award Number U01TW010120). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. icddr,b acknowledges with gratitude the commitment of NIH to its research efforts. icddr,b is also grateful to the Governments of Bangladesh, Canada, Sweden and the UK for providing core/unrestricted support.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09603123.2022.2150150

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Fogarty International Center [U01TW010120]