OBJECTIVE Pathophysiological mechanisms and pathways linking cardiovascular mortality and morbidity with air pollution were recently hypothesized. The present study evaluated association between air pollution and changes in heart rate variability as a marker of cardiac autonomic function in healthy individuals, and also determined the frequency of cardiac arrhythmias and QT interval changes on ...

The Clean Air Act requires that sensitive subgroups of exposed populations be protected from adverse health effects of air pollution exposure. Hence, data suggesting the existence of sensitive subgroups can have an important impact on regulatory decisions. Some investigators have interpreted differences among individuals in observed pulmonary function response to air pollution episodes as evide...

In recent years, severe and persistent air pollution episodes in China have drawn wide public concern. Based on ground monitoring air quality data collected in 2015 in Chinese cities above the prefectural level, this study identifies the spatiotemporal variations of air pollution and its associated driving factors in China using descriptive statistics and geographical detector methods. The resu...

Pollution: Associations Persist with Continued Advances in Research Methodology (See Neas et al., p. 629; Lee and Schwartz; p. 633; and Fairley, p. 637) In this issue of Environmental Health Perspectives there are papers by Fairley, Neas et al., and Lee and Schwartz. Although these papers present different approaches, they provide a reasonable representation of stateof-the-art epidemiologic res...

One of the classical data mining techniques is k-nearest neighbor. This method uses the class of the k nearest neighbor to classify a new instance. The distance is calculated with one of the multiple mathematical distance metrics. In this paper, the technique is used in the air quality forecast domain in order to predict the value of the air quality index. This index is used to categorize the p...

The main goal of this paper is to identify the drivers responsible for the high particulate matter concentrations observed in recent years in several urban areas in Poland. The problem was investigated using air quality and meteorological data from routine monitoring network, air mass back trajectories and multivariate statistical modelling. Air pollution in central and southern part of the cou...

BACKGROUND This study examined potential associations between exposure to episodes of air pollution and alterations in semen quality. The air pollution, resulting from combustion of coal for industry and home heating in the Teplice district of the Czech Republic, was much higher during the winter than at other times of year with peaks exceeding US air quality standards. METHODS Young men from...

In the early days of abundant resources and minimal development pressures, little attention was paid to growing environmental concerns in Malaysia. The haze episodes in Southeast Asia in 1983, 1984, 1991, 1994, and 1997 imposed threats to the environmental management of Malaysia and increased awareness of the environment. As a consequence, the government established Malaysian Air Quality Guidel...

[1] We use the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model and its adjoint to quantify source contributions to ozone pollution at two adjacent sites on the U.S. west coast in spring 2006: Mt. Bachelor Observatory (MBO) at 2.7 km altitude and Trinidad Head (TH) at sea level. The adjoint computes the sensitivity of ozone concentrations at the receptor sites to ozone production rates at 2 2.5 resolution ov...

Air pollution consists of both gaseous and particulate-matter pollutants. The former include nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3), and sulphur dioxide (SO2). The latter consist of particulate matter of varying aerodynamic diameter, as defined by cutoff points—for example, particles with diameters of ,10 mm (PM10) or ,2.5 mm (PM2.5). Because of their small size, these particles can be inhaled deep...