Spatiotemporally resolved air exchange rate as a modifier of acute air pollution-related morbidity in Atlanta

Epidemiological studies frequently use central site concentrations as surrogates of exposure to air pollutants. Variability in air pollutant infiltration due to differential air exchange rates (AERs) is potentially a major factor affecting the relationship between central site concentrations and actual exposure, and may thus influence observed health risk estimates. In this analysis, we examined AER as an effect modifier of associations between several urban air pollutants and corresponding emergency department (ED) visits for asthma and wheeze during a 4-year study period (January 1999–December 2002) for a 186 ZIP code area in metro Atlanta. We found positive associations for the interaction between AER and pollution on asthma ED visits for both carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen oxides (NOx), indicating significant or near-significant effect modification by AER on the pollutant risk-ratio estimates. In contrast, the interaction term between particulate matter (PM) 2.5 and AER on asthma ED visits was negative and significant. However, alternative distributional tertile analyses showed PM 2.5 and AER epidemiological model results to be similar to those found for NOx and CO (namely, increasing risk ratios (RRs) with increasing AERs when ambient PM 2.5 concentrations were below the highest tertile of their distribution). Despite the fact that ozone (O 3 ) was a strong independent predictor of asthma ED visits in our main analysis, we found no O 3 –AER effect modification. To our knowledge, our findings for CO, NOx, and PM 2.5 are the first to provide an indication of short-term (i.e., daily) effect modification of multiple air pollution-related risk associations with daily changes in AER. Although limited to one outcome category in a single large urban locale, the findings suggest that the use of relatively simple and easy-to-derive AER surrogates may reflect intraurban differences in short-term exposures to pollutants of ambient origin.