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The association between PM2.5 exposure and daily outpatient visits for allergic rhinitis: evidence from a seriously air-polluted environment

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Abstract

Limited evidence was seen as the association between fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and physician visits for allergic rhinitis (AR), especially in countries with extreme air pollution exposure. This paper addressed the issues about the association between PM2.5 and daily outpatient visits for AR among individuals residing in Beijing, China. Data on daily outpatient visits for AR obtained from Beijing Medical Claim Data for Employees and daily PM2.5 concentrations available from US embassy reports were linked by date from January 1, 2010, to June 30, 2012. A time-series analysis was conducted with a generalized additive Poisson model to assess the association between PM2.5 and AR, adjusting for daily average temperature, relative humidity, day of the week, calendar time, and public holiday. Totally, 229,685 outpatient visits for AR were included in the analysis. The daily mean (SD) concentration of PM2.5 was 99.5 (75.3) μg/m3 during the study period. We found that a 10-μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 content was associated with a 0.47% (95% CI: 0.39% to 0.55%) increase in the number of outpatient visits on the same day. Furthermore, results from subgroup analyses suggested that the association was consistently significant among the groups of different ages (< 65 years and ≥ 65 years) and gender. However, this study failed to find a statistically significant association in the autumn season but found significant positive associations during the spring and summer seasons (P for interaction < 0.001). This study indicated a possible association between PM2.5 and AR outpatients, which may benefit further researches in studying PM2.5 and its influence on diseases in a real and seriously air-polluted context.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Key Project of Natural Science Funds of China (Grant No. 81230066) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 81473043). The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Author notes

  1. Mengying Wang and Siyue Wang contributed equally to this work  and should be considered as co-first authors.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Peking University, 38 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100191, China

    Mengying Wang, Siyue Wang, Xiaowen Wang, Yaohua Tian, Yao Wu, Yaying Cao, Jing Song, Tao Wu & Yonghua Hu

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  1. Mengying Wang
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  2. Siyue Wang
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  3. Xiaowen Wang
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  4. Yaohua Tian
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  6. Yaying Cao
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  8. Tao Wu
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  9. Yonghua Hu
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Correspondence to Yonghua Hu.

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Since the data used in the present study was collected for administrative purpose without any personal identifiers, it is considered exempt from institutional review board approval.

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Wang, M., Wang, S., Wang, X. et al. The association between PM2.5 exposure and daily outpatient visits for allergic rhinitis: evidence from a seriously air-polluted environment. Int J Biometeorol 64, 139–144 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-019-01804-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-019-01804-z

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