| Summary: | 博士 === 朝陽科技大學 === 應用化學系生化科技博士班 === 101 === WHO describes air pollution as follow:“Air pollution is contamination of the indoor or outdoor environment by any chemical, physical or biological agent that modifies the natural characteristics of the atmosphere.” As a directly exposed part of the human body, the eyes are more susceptible to external stimulations of air pollution. The ill effects of air pollution on human eyes are mostly irritation and inflammation, with conjunctivitis being a significant problem. This study investigates the impact of air pollution on nonspecific conjunctivitis based on the data from ophthalmologic outpatient visits. The multi-area studies assessed the risk of short-term effects of air pollution on nonspecific conjunctivitis. The research focuses on the significance of air pollution impact on ocular health. Data for ophthalmology outpatient visit were obtained from the National Health Insurance Research Database of Taiwan. Nonspecific conjunctivitis was defined and filtered according to the International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision (ICD-9), diagnostic codes. Ambient air monitoring data are available from the Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration air pollution monitoring stations. Six regulated air pollutants and a total of fifty-one VOCs were included in the studies. The monitoring stations categorized to different area groups according to their locations. This study used a multi-area case–crossover design to investigate the association between daily air pollutant concentrations and the number of outpatient visits for nonspecific conjunctivitis. To estimate the average effect of all the areas, the area-specific results were combined using a random-effect meta-analysis.
The results show that the effects on outpatient visits for nonspecific conjunctivitis are strongest for O3 and NO2, with a 2.5% increase (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.9–4.1) for a 16.4 ppb (parts per billion) concentration rise in O3 and a 2.3% increase (95% CI, 0.7–3.9) for an 11.4 ppb concentration rise in NO2. Effects are also found for particulate matter (PM10) and SO2. Toluene, m,p-xylene, o-xylene, propylene, and benzene have higher maximum incremental reactivity (MIR) values and concentrations in air than any of the other studied VOCs. These 5 VOCs have the strongest short-term effects on outpatient visits for nonspecific conjunctivitis. The effect is strongest for toluene, and there is a 1.3% increase (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.4–2.2) for an interquartile range rise in concentration. All the results show no evident lag effects. This study, which combined and integrated air pollution and ophthalmologic data to investigate associations between outpatient visits for nonspecific conjunctivitis and air pollution levels found that the air pollutants NO2, SO2, O3, PM10, toluene, m,p-xylene, o-xylene, propylene, and benzene can increase chances of outpatient visits, suggesting possible causes for nonspecific conjunctivitis.
|
|---|
