Particulate air pollution, social confounders, and mortality in small areas of an industrial city

Michael Jerrett, Michael Buzzelli, Richard T. Burnett and Patrick F. DeLuca

Social Science & Medicine, 2005, vol. 60, issue 12, 2845-2863

Abstract: Scientists and policymakers have shown growing interest in the health effects of chronic air pollution exposure. In this study, we use geostatistical techniques in combination with small-area data to address a central research question: "Does chronic exposure to particulate air pollution significantly associate with mortality when the effects of other social, demographic, and lifestyle confounders are taken into account?" Our analysis relies on age-standardized mortality ratios for census tracts (CTs) of Hamilton (average population of 3419 persons), social and demographic data from the 1991 Census of Canada, smoking variables extracted from secondary surveys, and total suspended particulate (TSP) data from 23 monitoring stations operated by the Ministry of the Environment. Air pollution data are interpolated with a geostatistical procedure known as "kriging". This method translates fixed-site pollution monitoring observations into a continuous surface, which was overlaid onto the population-weighted centroids of the CTs. Our results show substantively large and statistically significant health effects for women and men. Evaluated over the inter-quartile range of the data, we found the relative risk of premature mortality for TSP exposure to be 1.19 (95% CI: 1.13-1.26) for women and 1.30 (95% CI: 1.24-1.37) for men. We also tested associations with cardio-respiratory and cancer mortality. We found positive, significant associations between particulate exposure and these causes of death in most models. Inclusion of socioeconomic, demographic, and lifestyle reduced but did not eliminate the health effects of exposure to particulate air pollution. Overall our results suggest that intra-urban variations in particulate air pollution significantly associate with premature, all-cause, cardio-respiratory, and cancer mortality in small areas of Hamilton.

Keywords: Air; pollution; Health; effects; Lifestyle; Socioeconomic; factors; Geostatistics; Canada (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(04)00555-6
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:60:y:2005:i:12:p:2845-2863

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().