Occupational, Environmental, and Climate Medicine Program

Cumulative Lifetime Burden of Cardiovascular Disease From Early Exposure to Air Pollution

Juyong Brian Kim
Mary Prunicki
Francois Haddad
Christopher Dant
Vanitha Sampath
Rushali Patel
Eric Smith
Cezmi Akdis
John Balmes
Michael P Snyder
Joseph C Wu
Kari C Nadeau
2020

The disease burden associated with air pollution continues to grow. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates ≈7 million people worldwide die yearly from exposure to polluted air, half of which-3.3 million-are attributable to cardiovascular disease (CVD), greater than from major modifiable CVD risks including smoking, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes mellitus. This serious and growing health threat is attributed to increasing urbanization of the world's populations with consequent exposure to polluted air. Especially vulnerable are the elderly, patients with pre-existing CVD...

Guidance to Reduce the Cardiovascular Burden of Ambient Air Pollutants: A Policy Statement From the American Heart Association

Joel D Kaufman
Mitchell S V Elkind
Aruni Bhatnagar
Kirsten Koehler
John R Balmes
Stephen Sidney
Melissa S Burroughs Peña
Douglas W Dockery
Lifang Hou
Robert D Brook
Francine Laden
Sanjay Rajagopalan
Katherine Bishop Kendrick
Jay R Turner
American Heart Association Advocacy Coordinating Committee
2020

In 2010, the American Heart Association published a statement concluding that the existing scientific evidence was consistent with a causal relationship between exposure to fine particulate matter and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, and that fine particulate matter exposure is a modifiable cardiovascular risk factor. Since the publication of that statement, evidence linking air pollution exposure to cardiovascular health has continued to accumulate and the biological processes underlying these effects have become better understood. This increasingly persuasive evidence necessitates...

Gradient boosting for Parkinson’s disease diagnosis from voice recordings

Ibrahim Karabayir
Samuel M Goldman
Suguna Pappu
Oguz Akbilgic
2020

Background
Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a clinically diagnosed neurodegenerative disorder that affects both motor and non-motor neural circuits. Speech deterioration (hypokinetic dysarthria) is a common symptom, which often presents early in the disease course. Machine learning can help movement disorders specialists improve their diagnostic accuracy using non-invasive and inexpensive voice recordings.

Method
We used “Parkinson Dataset with Replicated Acoustic Features Data Set” from the UCI-Machine Learning repository. The dataset included 44 speech-test based acoustic...

A Story of Health, Sofia’s Story: Wildfire Health Impacts

Mark Miller
Stephanie Holm, MD, MPH
2021

No abstract available

Health effects of wildfire smoke in children and public health tools: a narrative review

Stephanie M Holm
Mark D Miller
John R Balmes
2020

Wildfire smoke is an increasing environmental health threat to which children are particularly vulnerable, for both physiologic and behavioral reasons. To address the need for improved public health messaging this review summarizes current knowledge and knowledge gaps in the health effects of wildfire smoke in children, as well as tools for public health response aimed at children, including consideration of low-cost sensor data, respirators, and exposures in school environments. There is an established literature of health effects in children from components of ambient air pollution,...

The hazards of wildfire smoke exposure for children

Marissa Hauptman
John R Balmes
Mark D Miller
2020

Studies evaluating the health impacts of climate change, predict that the frequency and intensity of wildfires will increase as climate change creates longer, warmer, and drier seasons. Although respiratory morbidity in the immediate aftermath of wildfires is well documented for pediatric populations, other acute and chronic health effects from wildfires for pediatric populations are less well known. This manuscript addresses questions that arise for families, healthcare providers and school districts in areas affected by wildfires and reviews key messages that healthcare providers may...

Military Deployment and Respiratory Symptoms: Some Answers, Many Questions

Eric Garshick
Paul D Blanc
2020

No abstract available

Acute changes in lung function following controlled exposure to cookstove air pollution in the subclinical tests of volunteers exposed to smoke (STOVES) study

Kristen M Fedak
Nicholas Good
Ethan S Walker
John Balmes, MD
Robert D Brook
Maggie L Clark
Tom Cole-Hunter
Robert Devlin
Christian L'Orange
Gary Luckasen
John Mehaffy
Rhiannon Shelton
Ander Wilson
John Volckens
Jennifer L Peel
2020

Background: Exposure to household air pollution generated as a result of cooking and heating is a leading contributor to global disease. The effects of cookstove-generated air pollution on adult lung function, however, remain uncertain.Objectives: We investigated acute responses in lung function following controlled exposures to cookstove-generated air pollution.Methods: We recruited 48 healthy adult volunteers to undergo six two-hour treatments: a filtered-air control and emissions from five different stoves with fine particulate matter (PM2.5...

Association of Wildfire Air Pollution and Health Care Use for Atopic Dermatitis and Itch

Raj P Fadadu
Barbara Grimes
Nicholas P Jewell
Jason Vargo
Albert T Young
Katrina Abuabara
John R Balmes
Maria L Wei
2021

Importance: Air pollution is a worldwide public health issue that has been exacerbated by recent wildfires, but the relationship between wildfire-associated air pollution and inflammatory skin diseases is unknown.

Objective: To assess the associations between wildfire-associated air pollution and clinic visits for atopic dermatitis (AD) or itch and prescribed medications for AD management.

Design, setting, and participants: This cross-sectional time-series study assessed the associations of air pollution resulting from the...

Differences in the Estimation of Wildfire-Associated Air Pollution by Satellite Mapping of Smoke Plumes and Ground-Level Monitoring

Raj P Fadadu
John R Balmes
Stephanie M Holm
2020

Wildfires, which are becoming more frequent and intense in many countries, pose serious threats to human health. To determine health impacts and provide public health messaging, satellite-based smoke plume data are sometimes used as a proxy for directly measured particulate matter levels. We collected data on particulate matter <2.5 μm in diameter (PM2.5) concentration from 16 ground-level monitoring stations in the San Francisco Bay Area and smoke plume density from satellite imagery for the 2017-2018 California wildfire seasons. We tested for trends and calculated...