Personal exposure to household air pollution and lung function in rural Bangladesh: A population-based...

We assessed whether personal exposure to household air pollution [PM_2.5 and black carbon (BC)] is associated with lung functions (FEV₁, FVC, and their ratio) in non-smoking adults in rural Bangladesh. We measured personal exposure to PM_2.5 using gravimetric analysis of PM_2.5 mass and BC by reflectance measurement between April 2016 and June 2019. The average 24-hour PM_2.5 and BC concentration was 141.0μgm^-3 and 13.8μgm^-3 for females, and 91.7 μgm^-3 and 10.1 μgm^-3 for males, respectively. A 1 μgm^-3 increase in PM_2.5 resulted in a 0.02 ml reduction in FEV₁, 0.43 ml reduction in FVC, and 0.004% reduction in FEV1/FVC. We also found a similar inverse relationship between BC and lung functions (9.6 ml decrease in FEV₁ and 18.5 ml decrease in FVC per 1μgm^-3 increase in BC). A higher proportion of non-smoking biomass fuel users (50.1% of the females and 46.7% of the males) had restrictive patterns of lung function abnormalities, which need further exploration.