Traffic-related air pollution associated with prevalence of asthma and COPD/chronic bronchitis. A cross-sectional study in Southern Sweden

Background: There is growing evidence that air pollution from traffic has adverse long-term effects on chronic respiratory disease in children, but there are few studies and more inconclusive results in adults. We examined associations between residential traffic and asthma and COPD in adults in southern Sweden. A postal questionnaire in 2000 (n = 9319, 18–77 years) provided disease status, and self-reported exposure to traffic. A Geographical Information System (GIS) was used to link geocoded residential addresses to a Swedish road database and an emission database for NOx. Results: Living within 100 m of a road with >10 cars/minute (compared with having no heavy road within this distance) was associated with prevalence of asthma diagnosis (OR = 1.40, 95% CI = 1.04–1.89), and COPD diagnosis (OR = 1.64, 95%CI = 1.11–2.4), as well as asthma and chronic bronchitis symptoms. Self-reported traffic exposure was associated with asthma diagnosis and COPD diagnosis, and with asthma symptoms. Annual average NOx was associated with COPD diagnosis and symptoms of asthma and chronic bronchitis. Conclusion: Living close to traffic was associated with prevalence of asthma diagnosis, COPD diagnosis, and symptoms of asthma and bronchitis. This indicates that traffic-related air pollution has both long-term and short-term effects on chronic respiratory disease in adults, even in a region with overall low levels of air pollution. Background Traffic-related air pollution is well known to have shortterm effects on chronic respiratory disease, exacerbating symptoms and increasing hospital admissions for respiratory causes [1]. Strong effects on symptoms have also been observed in areas with relatively low background pollution [2]. Long-term effects have been disputed, but there is growing evidence that traffic-related air pollution is related, at least among children, to asthma incidence [37], decreased lung function development [8,9], and incidence of bronchitic symptoms [4,10]. Published: 20 January 2009 International Journal of Health Geographics 2009, 8:2 doi:10.1186/1476-072X-8-2 Received: 2 October 2008 Accepted: 20 January 2009 This article is available from: http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/8/1/2 © 2009 Lindgren et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.