Association between daily 1-km resolution levels of ambient air pollution and hospital visits for allergic diseases

He, B.-X., Ma, J.-J., Lai, H., Li, C.-G., Huang, L.-X., Huang, H.-N., Liu, X.-Q., Zhou, Z.-R., Xie, Y.-C., Kuang, P.-P., Ou, C.-Q. and Fu, Q.-L. (2023), Allergy. https://doi.org/10.1111/all.15904

To the Editor,

Allergic diseases are extremely common disorders. Air pollutants may play an important role in inducing and exacerbating symptoms, resulting in significant increases in hospital visits.1, 2 Previous studies commonly evaluated the effects of ambient air pollutants on allergic diseases based on population-average exposure data by averaging the levels of air pollutants at several air-monitoring stations.3, 4 Biased effect estimates may occur in these studies, since spatial gradients and individual variations in exposure were not considered. Herein, we aimed to assess the effects of ambient air pollution on outpatient visits for allergic diseases using individual exposure data.

Recently, we developed a model to accurately estimate the daily average fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone (O3) at each of 1 km × 1-km grid in Mainland China.5 In this study, we extracted individual data of all outpatients visiting the Department of Allergy at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University in 2014–2019...

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