Lung function and air pollution exposure in adults with asthma in Beijing: a 2-year longitudinal panel study

Abstract

The effect of air pollution on the lung function of adults with asthma remains unclear to date. This study followed 112 patients with asthma at 3-month intervals for 2 years. The pollutant exposure of the participants was estimated using the inverse distance weight method. The participants were divided into three groups according to their lung function level at every visit. A linear mixed-effect model was applied to predict the change in lung function with each unit change in pollution concentration. Exposure to carbon monoxide (CO) and particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM_2.5) was negatively associated with large airway function in participants. In the severe group, exposure to chronic sulfur dioxide (SO₂) was negatively associated with post-bronchodilator forced expiratory flow at 50%, between 25% and 75% of vital capacity % predicted (change of 95% CI per unit: –0.34 (–0.55, –0.12), –0.24 (–0.44, –0.03), respectively). In the mild group, the effect of SO₂ on the small airways was similar to that in the severe group, and it was negatively associated with large airway function. Exposure to CO and PM_2.5 was negatively associated with the large airway function of adults with asthma. The negative effects of SO₂ were more evident and widely observed in adults with severe and mild asthma than in adults with moderate asthma. Patients with asthma react differently to air pollutants as evidenced by their lung function levels.

Keywords

lung function / asthma / air pollution / adult

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2015CB553400) and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2018YFC1313600).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Jun Wang, Wenshuai Xu, Xinlun Tian, Yanli Yang, Shao-Ting Wang, and Kai-Feng Xu declare that they have no conflict of interest. All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5). Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11684-021-0882-1 and is accessible for authorized users. The Supplementary material contains the validation exposure assessment in IDW and Tables S1−S5.

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