The temporal pattern and the overall effect of ozone exposure on pediatric respiratory morbidity

Abstract

Up to now no study has investigated the temporal pattern of children’s respiratory morbidity due to ozone. In the present study, we investigate the temporal pattern and the general effect of ozone exposure on children and adolescents’ respiratory morbidity using data from a particularly well suited area in southern Europe to assess the health effects of ozone. The effects of ozone are estimated using the recently developed distributed lag non-linear models allowing for a relatively long timescale, while controlling for weather effects, a range of other air pollutants, and long and short term patterns. The public health significance of the estimated effects is higher than has been previously reported in the literature, providing evidence contrary to the conjecture that the ozone-morbidity association is mainly due to short-term harvesting. In fact, our data analysis reveals that the effects of ozone at medium and long timescales (harvesting-resistant) are substantially larger than the effects at shorter timescales (harvesting-prone), a finding that is consistent with all children and adolescents being affected by high ground-level ozone, and not just the very frail.