How atmospheric pollutants impact the development of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer: A...

The impact of air pollution on humans is a worrisome factor that has gained prominence over the years due to the importance of the topic to society. Lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are among the diseases associated with pollution that increase the mortality rate in Brazil and worldwide. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the impacts of air pollutants on mortality rates from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer (LC) using vector autoregressive (VAR) modeling. The adjusted model was a VAR(1) and, according to the Granger causality test, the air pollutants selected were PM₁₀, O₃, CO, NO₂, and SO₂. The shocks applied to the variables O₃, using the impulse response function, negatively impacted COPD; in the eighth period, which is stabilized. The LC variable suffered more significant variations from O₃ and after a shock in this variable, an initially negative response in LC occurred and the series stabilized in period nine. After one year, 20.19% of COPD variance was explained by O₃. After twelve months, the atmospheric pollutant O₃ represented 5.00% and NO₂ represented 4.02% of LC variance. Moreover, the variables that caused the highest impact on COPD and LC mortality rates were O₃ and NO₂, indicating that air pollution influences the clinical state of people who have these diseases and even contributes to their development. The VAR model was able to identify the air pollutants that have the most significant impact on the diseases analyzed and explained the interrelationship between them.