Search

Background: Short-term exposure particulate matter with a diameter of 10 µm or less (PM 10 ) and fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) has been associated with heart rate variability (HRV), but exposure to ultrafine particles (UFP) has been less well examined. We investigated the associations between the HRV outcomes and short-term exposure to UFP, PM 10 and PM 2.5 among school-aged children and seniors., Methods: CorPuScula (Coronary, Pulmonary and Sanguis) is a longitudinal, repeated-measure panel study conducted in 2000-2002 in Munich, Germany including 52 seniors (58-94 years old) with 899 observations and 50 children (6-10 years old) with 925 observations. A 10-min resting electrocardiogram was performed to assess resting HRV outcomes [Standard Deviation of Normal to Normal Intervals (SDNN), Root Mean Square of Successive Differences between Normal Heartbeats (RMSSD), Low Frequency power (LF), High Frequency power (HF), ration between low and high frequency (LF/HF)]. UFP and PM exposures were measured near the care home and school yard for seniors and children, respectively. Mean exposures during the day of examination (9-21 h) as well as 3-h, 12-h, 24-h, one-day, and two-day lags were assessed. Linear mixed-effect models were used to investigate the associations between short-term air pollution and HRV outcomes separately in children and seniors. The models were adjusted for sex, age, weather conditions (temperature, precipitation, and water vapor pressure), BMI, lifestyle and medical information. Two and multipollutant models adjusted for NO 2 and O 3 were performed., Results: Among seniors, we observed increases in SDNN, LF, HF and LF/HF ratio after short-term exposure to UFP (hourly and daily lags) in contrast to decreases in SDNN and RMSSD after exposure to PM 10 . Associations were generally robust to two- and multipollutant adjustment. Among children, we observed increases of the LF/HF ratio after short-term exposures to UFP at lags 12 and 24 h. In contrast, we observed decreases of the ratio after exposure to PM 2.5 and PM 10 . Results were largely unchanged for multipollutant modelling, however we found a more pronounced increase in SDNN and LF/HF (UFP lag 12 and 24 h) after adjusting for NO 2 ., Conclusions: Overall, among seniors, we observed associations of UFP and PM 10 exposure with sympathetic responses of the ANS, which play an important role in sudden heart attacks or arrhythmia. Among children we found more inconsistent associations between UFP and a delayed increase in HRV. Adjusting for co-pollutants including NO 2 and O 3 yielded robust results., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The authors DN, KO declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision., (© 2023 Haddad, Ogurtsova, Lucht, Glaubitz, Höppe, Nowak, Angerer and Hoffmann.)

Thermal effects of the environment are the most prominent environmental influences on the human body. Keeping the body core temperature in a narrow optimum range is the dominating physiological process. Thus, assessing thermal environments has been a major field in biometeorology for many decades, which is also reflected in the number of respective articles and their citations. In the early days of thermal assessments, simple indices only considering a few environmental parameters were used. The next step has been the development of heat budget models describing all relevant heat/energy fluxes to and from the human body. One of the first was PET, which has been presented in the most cited IJBM publication ever (1999). All of these models created by individual scientists have some shortcomings and confinements in their application. In order to overcome such restrictions and to bring the state of the art scientists of thermal modelling together a working group to define a "universal" thermal climate index (UTCI) has been founded, backed and driven by an own commission of the International Society of Biometeorology. This working group has developed a comprehensive open source tool to calculate UTCI for the assessment of outdoor thermal environments for biometeorological applications (see the IJBM special issue 56 (2012) on UTCI).

A summary of a critical review by a working group of the German commission on Air Pollution Prevention of VDI and DIN of the actual data on exposure and health effects (excluding cancer) of fine particulate air pollution is presented., Exposure: Typical ambient particle concentrations for PM10 (PM2.5) in Germany are in the range of 10-45 (10-30) microg/m3 as annual mean and 50-200 (40-150) microg/m3 as maximum daily mean. The ratio of PM2.5/PM10 generally amounts between 0.7 and 0.9., Health Effects: During the past 10 years many new epidemiological and toxicological studies on health effects of particulate matter (PM) have been published. In summary, long-term exposure against PM for years or decades is associated with elevated total, cardiovascular, and infant mortality. With respect to morbidity, respiratory symptoms, lung growth, and function of the immune system are affected. Short-term studies show consistant associations of exposure to daily concentrations of PM with mortality and morbidity on the same day or the subsequent days. Patients with asthma, COPD, pneumonia, and other respiratory diseases as well as patients with cardio-vascular diseases and diabetes are especially affected. The strongest associations are found for PM2.5 followed by PM10, with no indication of a threshold value for the health effects. The data base for ultra fine particles is too small for final conclusions. The available toxicological data support the epidemiological findings and give hints as to the mechanisms of the effects., Conclusion: The working group concludes that a further reduction of the limit values proposed for 2005 will substantially reduce health risks due to particulate air pollution. Because of the strong correlation of PM10 with PM2.5 at most German sites there is no specific need for limit values of PM2.5 for Germany in addition to those of PM10.

The study objective was to get more information on characteristics of ozone risk groups. We performed repeated (on average 16 times) lung function tests and interviews with 171 persons belonging to four different population subgroups (44 healthy children, 43 juvenile asthmatics, 43 athletes, and 41 elderly). The environmental half hour mean ozone concentrations ranged from 8 to 99 ppb. For two groups there was significant NO2 co-pollution. The asthmatics showed statistically significant ozone related increased ORs for eye irritations, the elderly for nose irritations. Significant lung function decrements (increase in ozone by 50 ppb) were found for asthmatics (FVC -4.3% afternoon one day lag, -4.9% afternoon two day lag, -3.6% morning one day lag) and children (FVC -3.2% same morning, PEF -11.9% same morning, PEF -4.6% morning one day lag). In the group of elderly, however, there were also some significant FVC and PEF increments. Ozone responders were found more often in the groups of asthmatics and children (21% resp. 18%) compared with elderly and athletes (both 5%). The results suggest that children and asthmatics have a higher risk of being ozone sensitive showing more ozone related acute lung function decrements than other population groups.