Air Pollution and Atherosclerosis: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of FourEuropean Cohort Studies in the ESCAPE Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background:In four European cohorts, we investigated the cross-sectional association between long-term exposure to air pollution and intima-media thickness of the common carotid artery (CIMT), a preclinical marker of atherosclerosis.Methods:Individually assigned levels of nitrogen dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter ≤ 2.5 μm (PM2.5), absorbance of PM2.5 (PM2.5abs), PM10, PMcoarse, and two indicators of residential proximity to highly trafficked roads were obtained under a standard exposure protocol (European Study of Cohorts for Air Pollution Effects—ESCAPE study) in the Stockholm area (Sweden), the Ausburg and Ruhr area (Germany), and the Girona area (Spain). We used linear regression and meta-analyses to examine the association between long-term exposure to air pollution and CIMT.Results:The meta-analysis with 9,183 individuals resulted in an estimated increase in CIMT (geometric mean) of 0.72% (95% CI: –0.65%, 2.10%) per 5-μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 and 0.42% (95% CI: –0.46%, 1.30%) per 10–5/m increase in PM2.5abs. Living in proximity to high traffic was also positively but not significantly associated with CIMT. Meta-analytic estimates for other pollutants were inconsistent. Results were similar across different adjustment sets and sensitivity analyses. In an extended meta-analysis for PM2.5 with three other previously published studies, a 0.78% (95% CI: –0.18%, 1.75%) increase in CIMT was estimated for a 5-μg/m3 contrast in PM2.5.Conclusions:Using a standardized exposure and analytical protocol in four European cohorts, we found that cross-sectional associations between CIMT and the eight ESCAPE markers of long-term residential air pollution exposure did not reach statistical significance. The additional meta-analysis of CIMT and PM2.5 across all published studies also was positive but not significant.Citation:Perez L, Wolf K, Hennig F, Penell J, Basagaña X, Foraster M, Aguilera I, Agis D, Beelen R, Brunekreef B, Cyrys J, Fuks KB, Adam M, Baldassarre D, Cirach M, Elosua R, Dratva J, Hampel R, Koenig W, Marrugat J, de Faire U, Pershagen G, Probst-Hensch NM, de Nazelle A, Nieuwenhuijsen MJ, Rathmann W, Rivera M, Seissler J, Schindler C, Thiery J, Hoffmann B, Peters A, Künzli N. 2015. Air pollution and atherosclerosis: a cross-sectional analysis of four European cohort studies in the ESCAPE Study. Environ Health Perspect 123:597–605; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1307711
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".