The br2 – weighting Method for Estimating the Effects of Air Pollution on Population Health

Protection Agency (EPA) for kindly providing additional data from their study on county-level PM2.5 concentrations vs. lung cancer incidence and mortality in North Carolina. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Goran Krstić at [email protected]. Uncertainties, limitations and biases may impede the correct application of concentration-response linear functions to estimate the effects of air pollution exposure on population health. The reliability of a prediction depends largely on the strength of the linear correlation between the studied variables. This work proposes the joint use of the coefficient of determination, r 2 , with the regression slope, b, as an improved measure of the strength of the linear relation between air pollution and its effects on population health. The proposed br 2-weighting method offers more reliable inferences about the potential effects of air pollution on population health, and can be applied universally to other fields of research.