School of Community Health Sciences, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA.
J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol. 2022 Mar;32(2):320-332. doi: 10.1038/s41370-021-00326-4. Epub 2021 Apr 24.
To capture the impacts of environmental stressors, environmental indices like the Air Quality Index, Toxic Release Inventory, and Environmental Quality Index have been used to investigate the environmental quality and its association with public health issues. However, past studies often rely on relatively small sample sizes, and they have typically not adjusted for important individual-level disease risk factors.
We aim to estimate associations between existing environmental indices and asthma prevalence over a large population and multiple years.
Based on data availability, we assessed the predictive capability of these indices for prevalent asthma across U.S. counties from 2003 to 2012. We gathered asthma data from the U.S. CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System by county and used multivariable weighted logistic regression models to estimate the associations between the environmental indices and asthma, adjusting for individual factors such as smoking, income level, and obesity.
Environmental indices showed little to no correlation with one another and with prevalent asthma over time. Associations of environmental indices with prevalent asthma were very weak; whereas individual factors were more substantially associated with prevalent asthma.
Our study suggests that an improved environmental index is needed to predict population-level asthma prevalence.
为了捕捉环境压力因素的影响，空气质量指数、有毒物质释放清单和环境质量指数等环境指数已被用于调查环境质量及其与公共卫生问题的关联。然而，过去的研究往往依赖于相对较小的样本量，并且通常没有调整重要的个体疾病风险因素。
我们旨在估计现有环境指数与哮喘流行率在大人群和多年中的关联。
根据数据的可用性，我们评估了这些指数在美国各县 2003 年至 2012 年期间预测哮喘流行率的能力。我们通过县从美国疾病控制与预防中心的行为风险因素监测系统收集哮喘数据，并使用多变量加权逻辑回归模型来估计环境指数与哮喘之间的关联，同时调整了个体因素，如吸烟、收入水平和肥胖。
环境指数彼此之间以及与随时间推移的哮喘流行率相关性很小。环境指数与哮喘流行率之间的关联非常微弱；而个体因素与哮喘流行率的关联更为密切。
我们的研究表明，需要一个改进的环境指数来预测人群水平的哮喘流行率。
