On the relationships between health outcome and urban air quality

Abstract

Environmental health indicators are used for assessing the impact on public health of exposure to environmental stressors. Air pollution is a complex phenomenon with considerable spatiotemporal and physicochemical variability and a high toll on the public health. In general, particulate ambient pollution is considered to be extremely hazardous, since different fractions (segments) of it were found to be associated with a variety of adverse health effects in humans. Specifically, numerous environmental epidemiology studies revealed associations between particulate pollutants and various cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes. Moreover, in the recent years some biological pathways that connect exposure to airborne pollutants and CVD outcomes were found, which provide the previously missing mechanistic link and specify toxicological routes that connect complex interactions among individual pollutants and attributed risk of CVD.