scholarly journals The Effects of Air Quality on Hospital Admissions for Chronic Respiratory Diseases in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, 2013–2015

Atmosphere ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 1060
Author(s):  
Karyn Morrissey ◽  
Ivy Chung ◽  
Andrew Morse ◽  
Suhanya Parthasarath ◽  
Margaret M. Roebuck ◽  
...  

This study assesses the impact of a decrease in air quality and the risk of hospital admissions to a public hospital for chronic respiratory diseases for residents of Petaling Jaya, a city in the Greater Kuala Lumpur area in Malaysia. Data on hospital admissions for asthma, bronchitis, emphysema and other chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, weather conditions and the Malaysian Air Pollution Index, a composite indicator of air quality, were collated. An unconstrained distributed lag model to obtain risk of hospitalization for a 10 μg/m3 increase in the API. The lag cumulative effect for a 10 μg/m3 increase in the API was calculated to test for harvesting in the short term. Findings indicate that after an initial decrease in admissions (days 3 and 4), admissions increased again at day 7 and 8 and this relationship was significant. We therefore conclude that a 10 μg/m3 increase has a greater effect on admissions for respiratory health in the short term than a harvesting effect alone would suggest. These results suggest that while air quality is improving in the Greater Kuala Lumpur area, no level of air pollution can be deemed safe.

Author(s):  
Francesco D’Aloisio ◽  
Pierpaolo Vittorini ◽  
Anna Rita Giuliani ◽  
Maria Scatigna ◽  
Jacopo Del Papa ◽  
...  

The study aims to investigate the impact of the earthquake on public health, in terms of hospitalizations for respiratory diseases in the Abruzzo region, focusing on the area damaged by the earthquake “Crater”. We collected data of hospitalizations of residents in Abruzzo between 2009 and 2015. Hospital Discharge Records (HDRs) with a primary diagnosis of respiratory disease were included and divided into pneumonia, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and respiratory insufficiency. Absolute frequencies and standardized hospitalization rates were calculated to perform both a short-term and a medium-long term analysis. A linear regression was performed using standardized hospitalization rates and the time. A total of 108.669 respiratory-related records were collected and the most frequent subgroup was respiratory insufficiency. Standardized Hospitalization Rates (SHRs) for respiratory diseases resulted higher in the non-Crater than Crater area, but the short-term analysis showed a significant increase in hospitalizations for pneumonia and respiratory insufficiency in the Crater area. The medium-long term analysis reported a significant difference on the slope decrease of hospitalizations for acute and chronic respiratory diseases in the Crater versus the non-Crater area. The earthquake may have played a triggering role in the increased detection of respiratory diseases. A temporal relationship between the quake and an increase in admissions was found although it is not yet possible to detect a direct cause-effect relationship.


2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Trerotoli ◽  
N. Bartolomeo ◽  
A.M. Moretti

Background and aim. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), although largely preventable, is a great health burden in all the countries worldwide. Statistics of morbidity and mortality of COPD show the need for correct management of the disease. Chronic Obstructive Respiratory Diseases (DRG 88) are in 9th place for discharge in in-patient hospital admission. It is necessary to establish specific indicators which are efficacious and relevant for the patient, the doctor and the health manager. This study will analyse the information in respect of hospital admissions (Hospital discharge database) in Puglia for the period 2000-2005. Methods. The analysis was carried out utilising the Puglia Region hospital patient discharge database, selecting those patients with admission for chronic respiratory disease as principal or secondary diagnosis. Results. Chronic respiratory diseases are more frequent in males and in people over 45 years old with frequency increasing with age. Geographical distribution shows that there are greater rates of hospitalisation in big cities and in the neighbourhood of industrial areas. Although the trend over time is slight. A higher percentage of re-admission has been found for patients with COPD, and the interval between the two admissions occurs within one or two months; the diagnosis at the second admission is the same as for the first. 10.6% of discharge forms report one diagnosis, especially in patients older than 65 years of age. Little could be said about diagnostic procedures because these are not reported on the discharge form. Conclusion. Hospitalisation data confirms expectations regarding age and sex of patients. The high hospitalisation rates indicate that in-patients care still remains the only viable treatment for COPD and other chronic respiratory diseases. The high number of exacerbations reflect the absence of out-patients service or community care, and the same diagnosis in more than one episode shows the lack of efficiency of health services and disease management. This data is necessary to understand disease distribution and the modification of disease management in order to reduce health care costs, to increase efficacy in disease control and to limit repeated exacerbation and so to obtain the maximum benefit for the patients.


2010 ◽  
Vol 67 (6) ◽  
pp. 473-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoran Milosevic ◽  
Dragan Bogdanovic ◽  
Sladjana Jovic ◽  
Aleksandra Stankovic ◽  
Suzana Milutinovic ◽  
...  

Background/Aim. In studies that investigate the health effects of short-term air pollution exposure, population-wide changes in acute outcomes such as mortality, hospital admissions and healthcare visits are linked to short-term variations in ambient pollutant concentrations. The aim of this study was to estimate the association between daily outdoor black smoke and sulphur dioxide levels and hospital admissions for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in Nis, within a period 2001-2005. Methods. A time series analysis was performed using separated regression models for each pollutant and disease group, by age groups and population as a whole. The effects of copollutant, meteorological factors and cyclic oscillations in hospitalization numbers were controlled. Results. A significant increase in hospital admissions was associated with a 10 ?g/m3 increase in the concentration of black smoke, for cardiovascular diseases: 3.14% (< 0.01) in children and youth under 19 years of age, 1.85% (< 0.001) in 19-64 age group, and 0.84% (< 0.05) in all ages, and for respiratory diseases: 1.77% (< 0.05) in 19-64 age group, and 0.91% (< 0.05) in all ages. The effects on hospitalizations for respiratory diseases in children and youth under 19 years of age, and for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in the elderly were not statistically significant. The increase of sulphur dioxide level was associated with the increased number of hospitalizations, for both cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in all age groups, but the influence was not statistically significant. Conclusion. Outdoor pollutants concentrations in urban area of Nis were below regulated limit values during most of the investigated period days but it is shown that even such a level of pollution has a significant effect on hospital admissions for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hippolyte d’Albis ◽  
Dramane Coulibaly ◽  
Alix Roumagnac ◽  
Eurico de Carvalho Filho ◽  
Raphaël Bertrand

AbstractAn estimation of the impact of climatic conditions—measured with an index that combines temperature and humidity, the IPTCC—on the hospitalizations and deaths attributed to SARS-CoV-2 is proposed. The present paper uses weekly data from 54 French administrative regions between March 23, 2020 and January 10, 2021. Firstly, a Granger causal analysis is developed and reveals that past values of the IPTCC contain information that allow for a better prediction of hospitalizations or deaths than that obtained without the IPTCC. Finally, a vector autoregressive model is estimated to evaluate the dynamic response of hospitalizations and deaths after an increase in the IPTCC. It is estimated that a 10-point increase in the IPTCC causes hospitalizations to rise by 2.9% (90% CI 0.7–5.0) one week after the increase, and by 4.1% (90% CI 2.1–6.4) and 4.4% (90% CI 2.5–6.3) in the two following weeks. Over ten weeks, the cumulative effect is estimated to reach 20.1%. Two weeks after the increase in the IPTCC, deaths are estimated to rise by 3.7% (90% CI 1.6–5.8). The cumulative effect from the second to the tenth weeks reaches 15.8%. The results are robust to the inclusion of air pollution indicators.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhan Ren ◽  
Xingyuan Liu ◽  
Tianyu Liu ◽  
Dieyi Chen ◽  
Kuizhuang Jiao ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: The positive associations between ambient PM2.5 and cardiorespiratory disease have been well demonstrated during the past decade. However, few studies have examined the adverse effects of PM2.5 based on an entire population of megalopolis. In addition, due to the lack of accurate methods of assessing individual PM2.5 exposure, further studies are still necessary to be launched in China.Methods: The study was conducted in Wuhan, a megacity in central China with about 10.8929 million population. Daily hospital admission records, from October 2016 to December 2018, were obtained from Wuhan Information center of Health and Family Planning, which administrates all the hospitals in Wuhan. The daily air pollution concentration and weather variable in Wuhan during the study period were collected. We developed Land use regression model (LUR) to assess individual PM2.5 exposure. Time-stratified case-crossover design and conditional logistic regression models were adopted to estimate cardiorespiratory hospitalization risks associated with short-term exposures to PM2.5. We also conducted stratification analyses by age, sex and season.Results: A total of 2,806,115 hospital admissions records were collected during the study period, from which we identified 332,090 for total cardiovascular diseases and 159,365 for total respiratory diseases. We found short-term PM2.5 exposure was associated with increased risk of cardiorespiratory hospital admission in Wuhan. Per 10 μg/m3 increase of PM2.5 at lag0~2 days was associated with 1.23% (95%CI: 1.01–1.45%) and 1.95% (95%CI: 1.63–2.27%) elevated risk of admission from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases respectively. The elderly were at higher PM-induced risks. The associations appeared to be more evident in the cold season than in the warm season.Conclusions: This study contributed evidence to support the short-term effects of PM2.5 on cardiorespiratory hospital admission, which may be helpful for air pollution control and disease prevention in Wuhan.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junfeng Peng ◽  
Chuan Chen ◽  
Mi Zhou ◽  
Xiaohua Xie ◽  
Yuqi Zhou ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND The overcrowding of hospital outpatient and emergency departments (OEDs) due to chronic respiratory diseases in certain weather or under certain environmental pollution conditions results in the degradation in quality of medical care, and even limits its availability. OBJECTIVE To help OED managers to schedule medical resource allocation during times of excessive health care demands after short-term fluctuations in air pollution and weather, we employed machine learning (ML) methods to predict the peak OED arrivals of patients with chronic respiratory diseases. METHODS In this paper, we first identified 13,218 visits from patients with chronic respiratory diseases to OEDs in hospitals from January 1, 2016, to December 31, 2017. Then, we divided the data into three datasets: weather-based visits, air quality-based visits, and weather air quality-based visits. Finally, we developed ML methods to predict the peak event (peak demand days) of patients with chronic respiratory diseases (eg, asthma, respiratory infection, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) visiting OEDs on the three weather data and environmental pollution datasets in Guangzhou, China. RESULTS The adaptive boosting-based neural networks, tree bag, and random forest achieved the biggest receiver operating characteristic area under the curve, 0.698, 0.714, and 0.809, on the air quality dataset, the weather dataset, and weather air quality dataset, respectively. Overall, random forests reached the best classification prediction performance. CONCLUSIONS The proposed ML methods may act as a useful tool to adapt medical services in advance by predicting the peak of OED arrivals. Further, the developed ML methods are generic enough to cope with similar medical scenarios, provided that the data is available.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jie-Qi Jin ◽  
Dong Han ◽  
Qi Tian ◽  
Zhao-Yue Chen ◽  
Yun-Shao Ye ◽  
...  

Abstract Few studies have evaluated the short-term association between hospital admissions and individual exposure to ambient particulate matter (PM2.5). Particularly, no studies focused on hospital admissions for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) at individual level. We assessed the short-term effects of PM2.5 on hospitalization admissions for COPD in Guangzhou, China, during 2014–2015, based on satellite-derived estimates of ambient PM2.5 concentrations at 1-km resolution near the residential address as individual-level exposure for each patient. 40,002 patients with COPD admitted to 110 hospitals were included in this study. A time-stratified case-crossover design with conditional logistic regression models was applied to assess the effects of PM2.5 based on 1-km grid data of aerosol optical depth provided by National Aeronautics and Space Administration on hospital admissions for COPD. Further, we performed stratified analyses by individual demographic characteristics and season of hospital admission. 10 µg/m3 increase in individual-level PM2.5 was associated with an increase of 1.6% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.6%, 2.7%) in hospitalization for COPD at lag of 0–5 days. The impact of PM2.5 on hospitalization for COPD was greater significantly in male and patients admitted in summer and accordingly the impacts may be exacerbated in the context of global warming. Our study strengthened the evidence for the adverse effect of PM2.5 based on satellite-based individual-level exposure data.


2013 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-22
Author(s):  
Andreja Kukec ◽  
Jerneja Farkas ◽  
Ivan Erzen ◽  
Lijana Zaletel-Kragelj

The aim of this study was to estimate the population burden of respiratory diseases in the Zasavje region of Slovenia that can be attributed to outdoor air pollution in order to gain relevant grounds for evidencebased public health activities. In 2008, 981 schoolchildren (age 6 to 12 years) were observed in a prevalence study. The prevalence of chronic respiratory diseases (CRD) and frequent acute respiratory symptoms (FARS) was related to the level of outdoor air pollution in the local environment (low, moderate and high pollution areas). Logistic regression was used as a method for statistical analysis. The prevalence of CRD was 3.0 % in low pollution areas, 7.5 % in moderate pollution areas, and 9.7 % in high pollution areas (p=0.005). After adjustment for the effects of confounders, 2.91-times higher odds for CRD were registered in high pollution areas in comparison to low pollution areas (p=0.017). The prevalence of FARS was: 7.8 % in low pollution areas, 13.3 % in moderate pollution areas and 15.9 % in high pollution areas (p=0.010). After adjustment for the effects of confounders, 2.02-times higher odds for FARS were registered in high pollution areas in comparison to low pollution areas (p=0.023). The study confirmed a significantly higher prevalence of CRD and FARS in children living in high pollution areas of Zasavje. These results at least partially prompted mutual understanding and cross-sectoral cooperation - prerequisites for solving complex problems involving the impact of air pollution on health.


Pneumologia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 166-173
Author(s):  
Ioana Buculei ◽  
Mona-Elisabeta Dobrin ◽  
Anda Tesloianu ◽  
Cristina Vicol ◽  
Radu-Adrian Crișan Dabija ◽  
...  

Abstract Air pollution is a major threat to public health, and the effects of pollution are perceived in all countries of the world, by all social categories, regardless of age. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has a growing prevalence worldwide and an increasing number of risk factors that exacerbate symptoms and accelerate disease progression. Exposure to air pollution is one of the less studied and less investigated risk factors for COPD. Depending on the size and chemical nature of the pollutant, it can overcome the defence mechanism of the respiratory system and enter the lung tissues, thus causing some respiratory diseases. The World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that six major air pollutants have been identified, namely particulate matter (PM), ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and lead. The severe impact of PM exposure is demonstrated by the link between exposure to high concentrations of PM and certain severe diseases such as silicosis, lung cancer, cardiovascular disease and COPD. In Iași County, Romania, air quality measurements are performed by six automatic air quality monitoring stations, and the data obtained are used to create annual reports and these are also available online. Due to the high concentrations of air pollutants, the city of Iași is one of the three topmost polluted cities in Romania. A future assessment on the impact of air pollution on the health of the inhabitants of these cities and the implementation of new methods to improve air quality is needed.


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