Dust storms and years of life lost in Seoul, South Korea

Abstract

TPS 681: Short-term health effects of air pollutants 1, Exhibition Hall, Ground floor, August 26, 2019, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM Dust storms have been evaluated as a risk factor for human health. However, previous studies have estimated the effect of dust storms on absolute numbers of death without considering premature death. To set public health priorities and allocate resources within limited budgets, it is important to know the actual burden of an exposure-induced mortality. We aimed to estimate years of life lost (YLL) due to Asian dust storm (ADS) in Seoul, South Korea during 2002-2013. We performed a time-series analysis using a generalized additive model with Gaussian distribution to investigate the association between daily YLL and ADS. We assessed both single and cumulative lag effects of ADS by using a distributed lag model up to 5 days. In a main model, daily YLL was regressed on the ADS variable (ADS day:1) with a distributed lag parameterization. We adjusted for 2-day average of weather variables (temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, and wind speed), calendar time, influenza epidemic, holidays, and day of the week. We used a spline function for calendar time (6 df), temperature (6 df), and other weather variables (3 df). We identified 108 ADS events during study period. Exposure to ADS was significantly associated with increased YLL of non-accidental deaths. Specifically, daily YLL was increased by 48.5 years (95% CI: 3.0–94.1) at lag 2 and by 104.8 years (95% CI: 30.9–178.4) over lags 0–5. In disease-specific analyses, the association between ADS and YLL of cardiovascular mortality was significant at lag 2 (19.6 years [95% CI: 1.6–37.7]) and over lag 0–5 (34.5 years [95% CI: 4.1–64.8]), while that for respiratory mortality was significant at lag 3 (7.9 years [95% CI: 0.2–15.5]). Exposure to ADS occurrences was associated with an increased YLL of non-accidental death. These findings could help establish public health priorities.