Historical Concentration Estimates for Air Pollutants for the Purpose of Health RiskAssessment and Epidemiological Studies of Chronic Diseases in Relation to Long-Term orLifetime Exposures

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND AIM Estimates of historical concentrations are necessary when epidemiological studies on chronic diseases, especially oncological diseases, need to relate to lifetime exposure to air pollutants. The aim was to develop a methodology to obtain the most reliable estimates of annual average historical pollutant concentrations, which are further applied to the evaluation of long-term exposure. METHODS A combination of air quality monitoring data, a modelled of five-year average pollutant concentrations in a grid 1x1 km and a number of spatial and time correlations of PM10, PM2.5, NO2, SO2, benzene, and B(a)P concentrations have been used. Subsequently, the data were corrected for residential areas and for emissions balances. RESULTS In the period 1997-2019, the result accuracy is mainly influenced by the number and territorial distribution of air quality monitoring stations in the respective district. For the period 1980-1995 concentration estimates are directly related to the 1997 and uses correlations with emission balance data, so is burdened with more uncertainty. The resulting annual concentration data represents six pollutants for 13 evaluated districts for the period 1980 - 2019. CONCLUSIONS This work is an original contribution to the interdisciplinary field of environmental epidemiology, dealing with the relationship between long-term or lifetime exposure to air pollutants and the incidence of chronic diseases. The methodology tries to solve the insufficient or different availability of historical input data from pollutant monitoring as effectively as possible. KEYWORDS air pollution; pollutant concentration; air quality monitoring; temporal and spatial pollutant correlation; historical concentrations; geographic information system; long-term exposures.