Air Pollution Ups Hospitalizations in Seniors

Cardiovascular, respiratory troubles increase, study finds

By Serena Gordon
HealthDay Reporter

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TUESDAY, March 7 (HealthDay News) -- More seniors end up in the hospital due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases on days when air pollution levels rise.

That's the conclusion of a large-scale study in the March 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that compared air pollution levels to the number and types of hospitalizations occurring at the same time.

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"This study provides strong evidence that daily hospital admission rates for cardiovascular diseases and respiratory diseases are higher when the fine particulate matter levels are increased from one day to the next," said study author Francesca Dominici, an associate professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dominici said just a small rise -- each 10 micron per cubed meter increment increased -- in the air pollution level results in about 11,000 extra hospitalizations for cardiovascular and respiratory disease.

She said the reason is clear: Small particles of air pollution can travel deep into the lungs.

To get an idea of how small these air pollution particles are, George Thurston, an associate professor of environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine, said to imagine the width of a human hair. That's about 100 microns. The particulate matter measured in this study was 2.5 microns.

In the late 1990s, the National Ambient Air Quality Standard required a nationwide monitoring system to measure the amount of fine particulate air pollution -- that's air pollution equal to or less than 2.5 microns in size (PM 2.5) -- present on any given day in 204 urban counties.

For the new study, Dominici and her colleagues used information from this monitoring system and compared it to daily rates of hospitalizations for a number of different conditions, including injuries, cardiovascular diseases and respiratory diseases. The hospitalization information came from records of more than 11.5 million Medicare enrollees, who were 65 years and older.

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