Short-Term Effects of Ozone on Mortality: Comparative Analysis of Urban and Suburban Zones in Madrid (Spain)

Open Access

Abstract

A large number of papers published in the last decades are related to the effect of ozone exposure on mortality worldwide. Several studies have been performed to investigate the effect of ozone on mortality in Madrid (Spain), but the findings of these local reports were focused only on the Madrid city. The association of daily concentrations of ozone with daily mortality was investigated using autoregressive Poisson regression models. This study explores the effects of ozone on all causes except accidents, cardiovascular and respiratory short-term mortality in two areas of the Madrid region: an urban area constituted by the Madrid municipality and an industrial sub-urban area surrounding the city. Using three years of daily data (2003-2005), it was analyzed the all-ages populations and the over-64 age groups. The average ozone concentrations over the study period were 54.07 ± 27.17 μg/m3 in the Madrid municipality and 70.09 ± 32.96 μg/m3 in the sub-urban municipalities surrounding the city. Our results in the all-ages group indicated that 0.69% of all causes except accidents, 1.15% of cardiovascular and 1.56% of respiratory daily deaths, respectively, could be attributed to exposure to ozone in the Madrid city, whereas 11.69% of daily respiratory deaths were attributable to ozone exposure in the Madrid sub-urban surroundings. Our results show a clear association between mortality and ozone exposure. The spatial heterogeneity of ozone effects on short-term mortality throughout the Madrid region may have implications for local environmental policies and also for social and health services planning. ; This research was funded by the European Commission FP7-ENV project "Health Risk from Environmental Pollution Levels in Urban Systems (HEREPLUS)", contract 212854. We wish give our thanks to the following contributors: the Madrid Community Institute of Statistics for supplying the mortality data; the Madrid Municipality authority and the Madrid Community government for providing the environmental data; the Palynology Network of the Madrid Regional Health Authority for supplying the pollen data and, the National Centre of Epidemiology for providing the influenza data. In addition, we also wish to give our special thanks to Julio Díaz and Cristina Linares for their support in the statistical analysis.