Air Pollutant Levels and Asthma Emergency Room Visits in a Highly Populous US Urban County During 2018-19

Objective: Air pollutants are linked to asthma exacerbation. The study purpose was to demonstrate an association between air pollutants levels and asthma emergency room (ER) visit trends in a highly populated US urban county in Georgia during 2018-2019. Methods: Time series analyses were conducted for the variations in daily numbers of children and adult asthma emergency room visits and changes in daily mean PM2.5, daily mean PM10 concentrations, daily max 1-hour SO2 concentrations, daily max 1-hour NO2 concentrations, daily max 8-hour ozone concentrations, and airborne pollen loads for 2018 to 2019 and potential trends were estimated by using the autoregressive integrated moving average or ARIMA model. Results: During 2018-2019, 15,418 asthma-related ER visits occurred. The pollutants NO2, PM2.5, PM10, and pollen were strong predictors of children's asthma ER visits between 2018 and 2019. No significant associations were observed between the levels of SO2, ozone, and children's asthma emergency ER visits. Conclusions: The findings from this time series study strongly suggest that there is a significant contributing relationship between certain air pollutants (NO2, PM2.5, PM10, and pollen) and asthma ER visits in children.