Association of ambient air pollution with hospital outpatient and emergency room visits in Shanghai, China

Few studies exist in China examining the association of ambient air pollution with morbidity outcomes. We conducted a time-series analysis to examine the association of outdoor air pollutants (PM10, SO2, and NO2) with hospital outpatient and emergency room visits in Shanghai, China, using 3 years of daily data (2005–2007). Hospital and air pollution data were collected from the Shanghai Health Insurance Bureau and Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center. Using a natural spline model, we examined effect of air pollutants with different lag structures including both single-day lag and multi-day lag. We examined effects of air pollution for the warm season (from April to September) and cool season (from October to March) separately. We found outdoor air pollution (SO2 and NO2) was associated with increased risk of hospital outpatient and emergency room visits in Shanghai. The effect estimates varied for different lag structures of pollutants’ concentrations. For lag 3, a 10 μg/m3 increase in concentration of PM10, SO2 and NO2 corresponded to 0.11% (95%CI: −0.03%, 0.26%), 0.34% (95%CI: 0.06%, 0.61%) and 0.55% (95%CI: 0.14%, 0.97%) increase of outpatient visit; and 0.01% (95%CI: −0.09%, 0.10%), 0.17% (95%CI: 0.00%, 0.35%) and 0.08% (95%CI: −0.18%, 0.33%) increase of emergency room visit. The associations appeared to be more evident in the cool season than in the warm season. In conclusion, short-term exposure to outdoor air pollution was associated with increased risk of hospital outpatient and emergency room visits in Shanghai. Our analyses provide evidence that the current air pollution level has an adverse health effect and strengthen the rationale for further limiting air pollution levels in the city.