Relationships between fixed-site ambient measurements of nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and particulate matter and personal exposures in Grand Paris, France: the MobiliSense study.

BACKGROUND

Past epidemiological studies, using fixed-site outdoor air pollution measurements as a proxy for participants' exposure, might have suffered from exposure misclassification.

METHODS

In the MobiliSense study, personal exposures to ozone (O), nitrogen dioxide (NO), and particles with aerodynamic diameters below 2.5 μm (PM) were monitored with a personal air quality monitor. All the spatial location points collected with a personal GPS receiver and mobility survey were used to retrieve background hourly concentrations of air pollutants from the nearest Airparif monitoring station. We modeled 851,343 min-level observations from 246 participants.

RESULTS

Visited places including the residence contributed the majority of the minute-level observations, 93.0%, followed by active transport (3.4%), and the rest were from on-road and rail transport, 2.4% and 1.1%, respectively. Comparison of personal exposures and station-measured concentrations for each individual indicated low Spearman correlations for NO (median across participants: 0.23), O (median: 0.21), and PM (median: 0.27), with varying levels of correlation by microenvironments (ranging from 0.06 to 0.35 according to the microenvironment). Results from mixed-effect models indicated that personal exposure was very weakly explained by station-measured concentrations (R < 0.07) for all air pollutants. The R for only a few models was higher than 0.15, namely for O in the active transport microenvironment (R: 0.25) and for PM in active transport (R: 0.16) and in the separated rail transport microenvironment (R: 0.20). Model fit slightly increased with decreasing distance between participants' location and the nearest monitoring station.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results demonstrated a relatively low correlation between personal exposure and station-measured air pollutants, confirming that station-measured concentrations as proxies of personal exposures can lead to exposure misclassification. However, distance and the type of microenvironment are shown to affect the extent of misclassification.