A population-based birth cohort study of the association between childhood-onset asthma and exposure to industrial air pollutant emissions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies of the association between air pollution and asthma onset have mostly focused on urban and traffic-related air pollution. We investigated the associations between exposure to industrial emissions and childhood-onset asthma in a population-based birth cohort in Quebec, Canada, 2002–2011. The cohort was built from administrative health databases. We developed separately for PM2.5 and SO2 different metrics representing children's time-varying residential exposure to industrial emissions: 1) yearly number of tons of air pollutant emitted by industries located within 2.5 km of the residence; 2) distance to the nearest “major emitter” (≥100 tons) of either PM2.5 and SO2 within 7.5 km of the residence, and; 3) tons of air pollutant emitted by the nearest “major emitter” within 7.5 km, weighted by the inverse of the distance and the percentage of time that the residence was downwind. To handle the large number of zeros (i.e., children unexposed) we decomposed the exposure variable into two covariates simultaneously included in the regression model: a binary indicator of exposure and a continuous exposure variable centered at the mean value among exposed children. We performed Cox models using age as the time axis, adjusted for gender, material and social deprivation and calendar year. We indirectly adjusted for unmeasured secondhand smoke. The cohort included 722,667 children and 66,559 incident cases of asthma. Across the different exposure metrics, mean percentage changes in the risk of asthma onset in children exposed to the mean relative to those unexposed ranged from 4.5% (95% CI: 2.8, 6.3%) to 10.6% (95% CI: 6.2, 15.2%) for PM2.5 and, from 1.1% (95% CI: −0.1, 3.3%) to 8.9% (95% CI: 7.1, 11.1%) for SO2. Indirect adjustment for secondhand smoke did not substantially affect the associations. In children exposed, the risk of asthma onset increased with the magnitude of the exposure for all metrics, except the distance to the nearest major emitter of SO2. In this population-based birth cohort, residential exposure to industrial air pollutant emissions was associated with childhood-onset asthma. Additional studies with improved models for estimating exposure to industrial point-sources are needed to further support the observed associations.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".