BACKGROUND It has been widely demonstrated that air pollution can affect human health and that certain pollutant gases lead to adverse obstetric outcomes, such as preeclampsia and fetal growth restriction. OBJECTIVES We evaluated the influence of individual maternal exposure to air pollution on placental volume and vascularization evaluated in the first trimester of pregnancy. METHODS This ...

The effects on heart rate variability (HRV) and arterial stiffness from exposure to ambient particulate matter and ozone have not been studied simultaneously. The aim of this study was to analyze these effects with refined exposure estimates from personal measurements of ozone and size-resolved particulate matter mass concentrations. The authors recruited 17 mail carriers in a panel study in Ta...

This paper develops an index of pollution based on the epidemiological dose-response function associated with each pollutant, and the welfare losses due to exposure to pollution. The probability of damage is translated into welfare losses, which provides the common metric required for aggregation. Isopollution surfaces may then be used to compare environmental quality over time and space. An Ai...

This paper presents a design of models for common air quality index prediction using computational intelligence methods. In addition, the sets of input variables were optimized for each air pollutant prediction by genetic algorithms. Based on data measured by the three monitoring stations of Dukla, Rosice and Brnenska in the Czech Republic, the models were designed to predict air quality indice...

The evaluation of the effects of air pollution on public health and human-wellbeing requires reliable data. Standard air quality monitoring stations provide accurate measurements of airborne pollutant levels, but, due to their sparse distribution, they cannot capture accurately the spatial variability of air pollutant concentrations within cities. Dedicated in-depth field campaigns have dense s...

The significant consumption of gas in the World results in the emission of greenhouse gases into atmosphere. Abadan refinery has always been the biggest and oldest oil refinery in the Middle East and has a variety of refined products. After six months of collecting data about pollutant concentration emitted from a stack of old furnaces of units 75 and new unit 200, the emission factor of the po...

As the regulations of pollutant emission is getting more and more strict, models of pollutant formation, as a part of system level models for control design, are needed. In this thesis NOx (nitrogen oxides) formation is modeled. A method is developed to mix equilibrium and non-equilibrium reaction equations to model NOx formation in combustion processes. This algorithm reduces high-index DAE sy...

Indoor environment air pollution measurement has become a necessity because of global warming and climate change. All across the globe researchers are trying to monitor the pollutant gases precisely in real time. Sensing system using sensor arrays has been developed to monitor indoor environment, however, these systems are costly and have not gained wide acceptance. Precise measurement of indoo...

The objective of this study was to test the inter-rater reproducibility of the Portuguese version of the PEDro Scale. Seven physiotherapists rated the methodological quality of 50 reports of randomized controlled trials written in Portuguese indexed on the PEDro database. Each report was also rated using the English version of the PEDro Scale. Reproducibility was evaluated by comparing two sepa...