Search

There are indications that air pollution is associated with increased hospital admissions for myocardial infarction. Hospital admissions, however, represent only a fraction of all the coronary events (fatal and non-fatal) in the population since acute fatal events are often not hospitalized. Our aim was to evaluate the association of daily air pollution with all acute myocardial infarction events (deaths and first hospital admissions) in the population of Rome. The study is a part of the multi-city HEAPSS project.All hospital admissions of people with a first acute myocardial infarction (AMI; ICD-9: 410) occurring in Rome in 1998-2000 (Rome residents only), were selected from the regional Hospital Information System. AMI was defined as first if there was no AMI hospitalisation during three preceeding years. All out-of-hospital deaths from first AMI (ICD-9: 410) were identified from regional Mortality Register during the same period. Daily air pollution data were taken from five city monitors. To estimate the association of AMI with air pollution, we adopted a time stratified case-crossover design, where control days were all same weekdays occurring within the same month than the index date. Daily weather variables were adjusted for in conditional logistic regression.During the study period, 12,620 cardiac events were observed; 3,821 people died outside of hospitals without a previous hospital admission for AMI, and 8,799 subjects were admitted to hospital for AMI. Odds ratios (OR) are reported in the table for an inter-quartile (IQR) range of each pollutant at lag 0-1 day. Table. No caption available. The study indicates that air pollutants from vehicular traffic increase the risk of fatal and non-fatal coronary events in the population of Rome. Similar analyses in the other HEAPSS cities are in progress. HEAPSS study was funded by European Commission (QLK4-2000-00708). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]