Effects of particulate matter (PM) on childhood asthma exacerbation and control in Xiamen, China

The short-term effects of particulate matter (PM) exposure on childhood asthma exacerbation and disease control rate is not thoroughly assessed in Chinese population yet. The previous toxic effects of PM exposure are either based on long-term survey or experimental data from cell lines or mouse models, which also needs to be validated by real-world evidences.

We evaluated the short-term effects of PM exposure on asthma exacerbation in a Chinese population of 3106 pediatric outpatientsand disease control rate (DCR) in a population of 3344 children using case-crossover design. All the subjects enrolled are non-hospitalized outpatients. All data for this study were collected from the electronic health record (EHR) in the period between January 1, 2016 and June 30, 2018 in Xiamen, China.

We found that exposure to PM_2.5 and PM₁₀ within the past two weeks was significantly associated with elevated risk of exacerbation (OR = 1.049, p < 0.001 for PM_2.5and OR = 1.027, p < 0.001 for PM₁₀). In addition, exposure to PM₁₀ was associated with decreased DCR (OR = 0.976 for PM₁₀, p < 0.001).

Our results suggest that exposure to both PM₁₀ and PM_2.5 has significant short-term effects on childhood asthma exacerbation and DCR, which serves as useful epidemiological parameters for clinical management of asthma risk in the sensitive population.