New Insights into Ambient Air Pollution and Human Health

Dear Colleagues,

Ambient air pollution poses a significant threat to public health globally, contributing to various adverse health outcomes. According to the World Health Organization, air pollution is one of the biggest threats to the environment and health. Every year, it kills people and incurs high health-related costs. People in urban areas are at greatest risk. Most of these premature deaths are caused by air pollutants such as particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and ground-level ozone. At the same time, air pollution shortens the duration of a healthy life, worsens the quality of life and accelerates the onset of chronic diseases. If at the beginning of the last century, ambient air pollution was associated with diseases of the respiratory system, today the approach is very broad and related to many areas of public health and medicine, including cardiovascular diseases, cancer and others.

This Special Issue invites the scientific community to address the following questions and topics:

1. How do different pollutants affect human health? Interactions between pollutants, hypotheses of disease development, impact to physiological – biochemical mechanisms of disease development.
2. How do demographics (age, gender, socio-economic status) influence the susceptibility and vulnerability to air pollution-related health issues?
3. Case studies across diverse regions to understand the varied impact of air pollution on different communities.

This Special Issue aims to advance the understanding of the complex relationship between ambient air pollution and health by providing new research hypotheses and evidence-based insights to health professionals, policy makers and urban planners.  A new approach to the problem of air pollution and health reveals the interactions between pollutants, including wider groups of diseases and new hypotheses of their development. Evidence-based research, large-scale epidemiological studies, physiological-biochemical mechanisms, genomic discoveries, and gene-environment interaction are the basis of modern science. With this Special Issue, we aim to expand existing knowledge and reveal new effects of ambient air pollution on human health and the mechanisms of their development.

Dr. Rūta Ustinavičienė
Guest Editor

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