Air pollution could potentially trigger non-fatal heart attacks.
Air pollution is extremely harmful to health, as everyone knows. According to scientists, it increases blood pressure, the risk of atherosclerosis, asthma, brain tumor and weakens the bones and even the fetus when a pregnant woman is too exposed to it. Now, a new study shows a link between air pollution and an increased risk of myocardial infarction, a condition better known as heart attack. According to a study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectivesexposure for only a few hours to ultrafine particles common in air pollution can potentially trigger a non-fatal attack.
Ultrafine particles pose a health risk due to their small size, large surface area per unit mass, and ability to penetrate cells and enter the bloodstream. “We were the first to demonstrate the effects of PUE on the health of asthmatics in an epidemiological study in the 1990s,” says Annette Peters, director of the Institute of Epidemiology at the Helmholtz Center in Munich (Germany) and co – author of this article. “Since then, around 200 more studies have been published. However, the epidemiological evidence remains inconsistent and insufficient to infer a causal relationship.
According to the study authors, this could be partly explained by the differences in size and exposure parameters examined to characterize ambient exposure to ultrafine particles. Here, the researchers wanted to understand whether transient exposure could trigger heart attacks and whether other measurements like particle length and surface concentrations could improve the study of the health effects of these particles.
The first hours of exposure are the most dangerous
Kai Chen, assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health (USA) and German colleagues from the Helmholtz Center, Augsburg University Hospital and Nördlingen Hospital, studied data from a register of all non-fatal heart attacks in Augsburg between 2005 and 2015. Thus, 5,898 patients were affected.
The researchers compared individual heart attacks to ultrafine particle (UFP) data on air pollution at the time of infarction. After taking into account other factors such as the day of the week or the socio-economic status of the patient, they found that “tiny particles from air pollution may play a role in serious heart disease. ”
“This is particularly true in the first hours of exposure”, explains Chen, recalling that we “suspected” this phenomenon “for a long time”. “This represents an important step towards understanding the appropriate indicator of ultrafine particle exposure to determine short-term health effects, as the effects of particle length and surface concentrations were stronger than those particle number concentration and remained similar after adjusting for other air pollutants,” he says.
Every year in France, 7,500 people die from nitrogen dioxide
And to continue: “Our future analyzes will examine combined hourly exposures to both air pollution and temperature extremes. We will also identify vulnerable subpopulations with respect to pre-existing conditions and medication use.”
In France, air pollution is a real public health issue. On October 24, European justice issued a report accusing France of having exceeded since 2010 “systematically and persistently” the threshold limit in the air of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a polluting gas mainly from diesel engines. If the air pollution rate is exceeded, European legislation obliges the pinned country to establish a plan relating to air quality, and to ensure that the period of the overrun is “as short as possible”.
“The government is determined to quickly and sustainably improve air quality, which is a public health and environmental imperative,” the Ministry of Ecological Transition then responded to justice. According to the latest report from theEuropean Environment Agency on Air Qualitynitrogen dioxide causes 7,500 deaths each year in France (68,000 in the European Union).
As for myocardial infarction, which corresponds to the partial destruction of the heart muscle, due to the obstruction of an artery which supplies the heart with blood, and therefore with oxygen, it concerns 80,000 people in France. Among them, 12,000 die, reminds Inserm. Besides air pollution, the most well-known risk factors are smoking, high cholesterol, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, obesity and stress. Men over 55 are also more likely than others to have heart attacks. After menopause, however, the risks are equivalent for both sexes.
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