Exposure to air pollution contributes to the development of cardiovascular diseases (heart disease and stroke). A person’s relative risk due to air pollution is small compared with the impact of established cardiovascular risk factors such as smoking, obesity, or high blood pressure. However, this is a serious public health problem because an enormous number of people are exposed over an entire lifetime.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduced its 1997 National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) to educate the public about daily air quality levels, including information about ozone and particulate matter levels. The American Heart Association supports these EPA guidelines for activity restriction for people with heart disease or those who have certain cardiovascular risk factors and for people with pulmonary disease and diabetes and the elderly.
Air pollution is composed of carbon monoxide, nitrates, sulfur dioxide, ozone, lead, secondhand tobacco smoke and particulate matter. Particulate matter, also known as particle pollution, is composed of solid and liquid particles within the air. It can be generated from vehicle emissions, tire fragmentation and road dust, power generation and industrial combustion, smelting and other metal processing, construction and demolition activities, residential wood burning, windblown soil, pollens, molds, forest fires, volcanic emissions and sea spray.
Nineteen percent of all U.S. counties with air-quality monitoring systems are presently not meeting these standards. This inadequacy soars to much higher estimates in regions such as the industrial Midwest (41 percent) and California (60 percent).
Some research has estimated that people living in the most polluted U.S. cities could lose between 1.8 and 3.1 years because of exposure to chronic air pollution. This has led some scientists to conclude that short-term exposure to elevated levels of particle pollution is associated with a higher risk of death due to a cardiovascular event. And prolonged exposure to elevated levels of particle pollution is a factor in reducing overall life expectancy by a few years.
