The association between short-term exposure to PM1 and daily hospital admission and related expenditures in Beijing

Abstract

Abstract Ambient particulate matter (PM) pollution has been a leading environmental health threat throughout the world. PM with aerodynamic diameter ≤ 1.0 µm, also known as PM1, has been implicated in the morbidity and mortality of several cardiorespiratory and cerebrovascular diseases. However, previous studies have mostly focused on analysing fine PM (PM2.5) associated disease metrics including emergency department visits and mortality. Here, using air pollution and hospital admission (HA) data in Beijing from 2015 to 2017, we performed a time-series analysis and meta-analysis to evaluate the association between short-term PM1 exposure and HA of all-cause, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and respiratory infection (RI) diseases. It was found that as per 10 µg/m3 increase of PM1 concentration, all-cause disease HA increased by 0.07% (95% CI: [0, 0.14%]) in Beijing during 2015–2017, while COPD and RI-related HA was not significantly associated with short-term PM1 exposure. We then estimated the attributable number of HA and hospital expenditure related to all-cause diseases. An average of 6644 (95% CI: [351, 12917]) cases of HA were found to be attributable to ambient PM1, which was estimated to associate with 106 (95% CI: [5.6, 207]) million CNY increase in hospital expenditure every year, accounting for 0.32% (95% CI: [0.02, 0.62%]) of the annual total expense. The findings reported here highlights the underlying impact of ambient PM pollution on health risks and economic burden to the society, which also indicates the need for further policy actions on public health.