Effects of particulate matter (PM) on childhood asthma exacerbation and control in Xiamen, China

Background The short-term effects of particulate matter (PM) exposure on childhood asthma exacerbation and disease control rate is not thoroughly assessed in Chinese population yet. The previous toxic effects of PM exposure are either based on long-term survey or experimental data from cell lines or mouse models, which also needs to be validated by real-world evidences. Methods We evaluated the short-term effects of PM exposure on asthma exacerbation in a Chinese population of 3106 pediatric outpatientsand disease control rate (DCR) in a population of 3344 children using case-crossover design. All the subjects enrolled are non-hospitalized outpatients. All data for this study were collected from the electronic health record (EHR) in the period between January 1, 2016 and June 30, 2018 in Xiamen, China. Results We found that exposure to PM 2.5 and PM 10 within the past two weeks was significantly associated with elevated risk of exacerbation (OR = 1.049, p < 0.001 for PM 2.5 and OR = 1.027, p < 0.001 for PM 10 ). In addition, exposure to PM 10 was associated with decreased DCR (OR = 0.976 for PM 10 , p < 0.001). Conclusions Our results suggest that exposure to both PM 10 and PM 2.5 has significant short-term effects on childhood asthma exacerbation and DCR, which serves as useful epidemiological parameters for clinical management of asthma risk in the sensitive population.