Relationships among Indoor, Outdoor, and Personal Airborne Japanese Cedar Pollen Counts

Naomichi Yamamoto, Yuuki Matsuki, Hiromichi Yokoyama and Hideaki Matsuki

PLOS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, issue 6, 1-14

Abstract: Japanese cedar pollinosis (JCP) is an important illness caused by the inhalation of airborne allergenic cedar pollens, which are dispersed in the early spring throughout the Japanese islands. However, associations between pollen exposures and the prevalence or severity of allergic symptoms are largely unknown, due to a lack of understanding regarding personal pollen exposures in relation to indoor and outdoor concentrations. This study aims to examine the relationships among indoor, outdoor, and personal airborne Japanese cedar pollen counts. We conducted a 4-year monitoring campaign to quantify indoor, outdoor, and personal airborne cedar pollen counts, where the personal passive settling sampler that has been previously validated against a volumetric sampler was used to count airborne pollen grains. A total of 256 sets of indoor, outdoor, and personal samples (768 samples) were collected from 9 subjects. Medians of the seasonally-integrated indoor-to-outdoor, personal-to-outdoor, and personal-to-indoor ratios of airborne pollen counts measured for 9 subjects were 0.08, 0.10, and 1.19, respectively. A greater correlation was observed between the personal and indoor counts (r = 0.89) than between the personal and outdoor counts (r = 0.71), suggesting a potential inaccuracy in the use of outdoor counts as a basis for estimating personal exposures. The personal pollen counts differed substantially among the human subjects (49% geometric coefficient of variation), in part due to the variability in the indoor counts that have been found as major determinants of the personal pollen counts. The findings of this study highlight the need for pollen monitoring in proximity to human subjects to better understand the relationships between pollen exposures and the prevalence or severity of pollen allergy.

Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131710 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 31710&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0131710

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0131710

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().