Monitoring the air particulate concentration both outdoors and indoors is becoming a more relevant issue in the past few decades. An innovative, fully automatic, monitoring system called CleAir is presented. Such a system wants to go beyond the traditional technique (gravimetric analysis), allowing for a double monitoring approach: the traditional gravimetric analysis as well as the optical spe...

Airborne particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less (PM2.5), as well as slightly bigger particles (PM10), arrive from the westerly direction and collect in the city centre of Tehran, the capital of Iran. The statistical characteristics and daily trend of the air quality index (AQI) in Theran were studied over an 11-year period (2002- 2012). Various statistical analyses were appli...

Sources of regional particulate matter (PM), particularly agricultural operations, must be understood in order to manage the air quality in irrigated dry climates. Direct monitoring measurements alone are useful, but not sufficient, to estimate regional PM source concentrations. This paper combines modeling with ground (point) and airplane (spatial) measurement methods to estimate regional PM10...

Multiple sclerosis is a common cause of neurological disability in the young adult, but, at present, disease modifying medication may have little, if any, effect upon long term clinical impairment. For this reason, there is a continuing need to understand the mechanisms that lead to long term disability and in the context of clinical trials to develop reliable surrogate markers of disease progr...

The design of a double inversion recovery (DIR) sequence, to image selectively grey or white brain matter, is described. Suitable choice of inversion times allows either cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and white matter to be suppressed, to image the cortex alone, or CSF and grey matter to be suppressed, to image the white matter. The DIR sequence was found to give clear delineation of the cerebral co...

The work in this thesis applies magnetization transfer imaging (MTI) and conventional MRI measures (brain volume, T2 lesion load and enhancing lesions) to investigate the mechanisms underlying progression in primary progressive multiple sclerosis (PPMS), and identifies MR markers to predict and monitor progression. First, we demonstrated that MTI was sensitive to change in the normal appearing ...

Suggestive associations of suicide with air pollutant concentrations have been reported. Recognizing regional and temporal variability of pollutant concentrations and of suicide, we undertook a detailed meta-analysis of completed suicides in relation to 5 major pollutants over 6 years in the 16 administrative regions of the Republic of Korea, while also controlling for other established influen...

Ambient particulate matter has been associated consistently with an increased risk for mortality largely due to cardiovascular diseases.1 Although the relative risk estimates from epidemiological studies are small, they apply to almost the entire population of the United States. Consequently, exposure to ambient particles produces considerable burden of disease, and its mitigation offers the be...

Erratum: “An Integrated Risk Function for Estimating the Global Burden of Disease Attributable to Ambient Fine Particulate Matter Exposure” In “An Integrated Risk Function for Estimating the Global Burden of Disease Attributable to Ambient Fine Particulate Matter Exposure” by Burnett et al. [Environ Health Perspect 122:397–403 (2014); http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1307049], the authors omitted ...

The public is increasingly concerned about particulate matter pollution caused by respirable suspended particles (PM10) and fine particles (PM2.5). In this paper, PM10 and PM2.5 concentration are estimated with remote sensing and individual air quality indexes of PM10 and PM2.5 (IPM10 and IPM2.5) over mainland China in 2010 are calculated. We find that China suffered more serious PM2.5 than PM1...