Association between Air Pollution and Emergency Room Visits for Atrial Fibrillation

Angelo G. Solimini and Matteo Renzi
Additional contact information
Angelo G. Solimini: Department of Public Health and Infectious Diseases, Sapienza University of Rome, Piazza A. Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy
Matteo Renzi: Department of Epidemiology, Lazio Regional Health Service, ASL Rome 1, 00147 Rome, Italy

IJERPH, 2017, vol. 14, issue 6, 1-10

Abstract: Despite the large prevalence in the population, possible factors responsible for the induction of atrial fibrillation (AF) events in susceptible individuals remain incompletely understood. We investigated the association between air pollution levels and emergency department admissions for AF in Rome. We conducted a 14 years’ time-series study to evaluate the association between the daily levels of air pollution (particulate matter, PM 10 and PM 2.5 , and nitrogen dioxide, NO 2 ) and the daily count of emergency accesses for AF (ICD-9 code: 427.31). We applied an over-dispersed conditional Poisson model to analyze the associations at different lags after controlling for time, influenza epidemics, holiday periods, temperature, and relative humidity. Additionally, we evaluated bi-pollutant models by including the other pollutant and the influence of several effect modifiers such as personal characteristics and pre-existing medical conditions. In the period of study, 79,892 individuals were admitted to the emergency departments of Rome hospitals because of AF (on average, 15.6 patients per day: min = 1, max = 36). Air pollution levels were associated with increased AF emergency visits within 24 h of exposure. Effect estimates ranged between 1.4% (0.7–2.3) for a 10 µg/m 3 increase of PM 10 to 3% (1.4–4.7) for a 10 µg/m 3 increase of PM 2.5 at lag 0–1 day. Those effects were higher in patients ?75 years for all pollutants, male patients for PM 10 , and female patients for NO 2 . The presence of previous cardiovascular conditions, but not other effect modifiers, increase the pollution effects by 5–8% depending on the lag. This study found evidence that air pollution is associated with AF emergency visits in the short term.

Keywords: air pollution; atrial fibrillation; time series; cardiac arrhythmias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/6/661/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/6/661/ (text/html)

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:gam:jijerp:v:14:y:2017:i:6:p:661-:d:101971

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().