Time-series analyses of air pollution and mortality in the United States: a subsampling approach
Open accessAbstract
BACKGROUND: Hierarchical Bayesian methods have been used in previous papers to estimate national mean effects of air pollutants on daily deaths in time-series analyses. OBJECTIVES: We obtained maximum likelihood estimates of the common national effects of the criteria pollutants on mortality based on time-series data from ≤ 108 metropolitan areas in the United States. METHODS: We used a subsampling bootstrap procedure to obtain the maximum likelihood estimates and confidence bounds for common national effects of the criteria pollutants, as measured by the percentage increase in daily mortality associated with a unit increase in daily 24-hr mean pollutant concentration on the previous day, while controlling for weather and temporal trends. We considered five pollutants [PM10, ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and sulfur dioxide (SO2)] in single- and multipollutant analyses. Flexible ambient concentration-response models for the pollutant effects were considered as well. We performed limited sensitivity analyses with different degrees of freedom for time trends. RESULTS: In single-pollutant models, we observed significant associations of daily deaths with all pollutants. The O3 coefficient was highly sensitive to the degree of smoothing of time trends. Among the gases, SO2 and NO2 were most strongly associated with mortality. The flexible ambient concentration-response curve for O3 showed evidence of nonlinearity and a threshold at about 30 ppb. CONCLUSIONS: Differences between the results of our analyses and those reported from using the Bayesian approach suggest that estimates of the quantitative impact of pollutants depend on the choice of statistical approach, although results are not directly comparable because they are based on different data. In addition, the estimate of the O3-mortality coefficient depends on the amount of smoothing of time trends.
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Recent studies found evidence of a threshold effect around 30 ppb (approximately 60 μg/m3) using the 24-hour average metric in the U.S., 30-40 ppb (approximately 60-80 μg/m3) in Korea and Japan, and 65 μg/m3 using the MDA8 metric in London, U.K.
“On the contrary, recent studies found evidence of a threshold effect around 30 ppb (approximately 60 μg/m3) using the 24-hour average metric in U.S. (Moolgavkar et al., 2013; Stylianou and Nicolich, 2009), 30–40 ppb (approximately 60–80 μg/m3) using the 24-hour average metric in Korea and Japan (Bae et al., 2015), and 65 μg/m3 using the MDA8 metric in London, U.K. (Atkinson et al., 2012).”
From Acute effect of ozone exposure on daily mortality in seven cities of Jiangsu Province, China: no clear evidence for threshold (2017) · cites this paper as Moolgavkar et al., 2013
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- Authors
- Moolgavkar, S. H., McClellan, R. O., Dewanji, A., Turim, J., Luebeck, E. G., & Edwards, M.
- Affiliations
- Exponent (United States) (US)
- Toxicology and Human Health Risk Analysis, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
- Indian Statistical Institute (IN)
- Fred Hutch Cancer Center (US)
- Corresponding author
- Moolgavkar, Suresh H.
- Venue
- Environmental Health Perspectives
- Publisher
- American Chemical Society (ACS)
- Published
- 2012-10-24
- Volume
- 121
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 73-78
- ISSN
- 0091-6765 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-9924
- PMC
- PMC3553428
- OpenAlex
- W1754526007
- Cited by
- 46
- References
- 21
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 7 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 7 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 2.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- public-domain
- creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (vor, 1892 d)
- Locations
- Environmental Health Perspectives (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis › Air Quality and Health Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis › Climate Change and Health Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Statistical Methods in Epidemiology
- Keywords
- air pollution, mortality, criteria pollutants, ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, PM10, concentration-dependent effects, threshold, daily deaths
- MeSH terms
- Air Pollution, United States, Models, Statistical
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