New Insights into Ambient Air Pollution and Human Health

A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Air Quality and Human Health".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2024 | Viewed by 794

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, Faculty of Public Health, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, LT-47181 Kaunas, Lithuania
Interests: air pollution; public health; epidemiology

Special Issue Information

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

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • air pollution
  • public health
  • health effects
  • epidemiology
  • air pollutants
  • PM2.5
  • cardiovascular diseases
  • pulmonary diseases
  • ground-level ozone
  • nitrogen oxides
  • ambient air quality
  • allergies

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Review

19 pages, 823 KiB  
Review
Trends in the Use of Air Quality Indexes in Asthma Studies
by Angie Daniela Barrera-Heredia, Carlos Alfonso Zafra-Mejía, Alejandra Cañas Arboleda, María José Fernández Sánchez, Liliana López-Kleine and Adriana Rojas Moreno
Atmosphere 2024, 15(7), 847; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos15070847 - 18 Jul 2024
Viewed by 498
Abstract
International air quality indexes (AQIs) are derived from air pollution and are essential global tools for mitigating diseases such as asthma, as they are used to reduce exposure to triggers. The aim of this article is to systematically review the global literature on [...] Read more.
International air quality indexes (AQIs) are derived from air pollution and are essential global tools for mitigating diseases such as asthma, as they are used to reduce exposure to triggers. The aim of this article is to systematically review the global literature on the use of AQIs in asthma-related studies. To evaluate the importance of the variables considered, a citation frequency index (Q) was used. The results suggest that the most frequently reported air pollutants related to asthma are PM (Q3) > NO2 (Q3) > O3 (Q3) > CO (Q3) > NO (Q3) > SO2 (Q3). In addition, climate variables play a relevant role in asthma research. Temperature (Q4) emerged as the most relevant climate variable, followed by atmospheric pressure (Q3) > wind direction (Q3) > solar radiation (Q3) > precipitation (Q3) > wind speed (Q3). AQIs, specifically the U.S.EPA Air Quality Index and the Air Quality Health Index, are directly associated with air pollution and the prevalence, severity and exacerbation of asthma. The findings also suggest that climate change presents additional challenges in relation to asthma by influencing the environmental conditions that affect the disease. Finally, this study provides a comprehensive view of the relationships among air quality, air pollutants and asthma and highlights the need for further research in this field to develop public health policies and environmental regulations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Insights into Ambient Air Pollution and Human Health)
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