Air Pollution: Chemical Particles Breathed In Increase Heart Attack Risk

What we put into our bodies--including what we eat and breathe--can ultimately have a long-term impact on our health.

New findings published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives focuses on air pollution. On how tiny chemical particles trapped in the air can come into our lungs, increasing our overall mortality risk, as well.

"Our data add to a growing body of evidence that particulate matter is really harmful to health, increasing overall mortality, mostly deaths from cardiovascular disease, as well as deaths from respiratory disease in nonsmokers," George Thurston, lead study investigator and a professor of population health and environmental medicine at NYU Langone, said in a statement. "Our study is particularly notable because all the data used in our analysis comes from government- and independently held sources."

A team of researchers at New Yokr University noted how this kind of air pollution is almost invisible to the human eye, and found in minuscule amounts in particles of just about 10 micrograms per cubic meter of air. However, even amounts as small as these can be quite deadly, with roughly a 10 percent increase in risk of death due to heart disease. In fact, for nonsmokers, this increase rises up to 27 percent in cases of death due to respiratory disease.

In this recent study, researchers surveyed over 500,000 Americans from California, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and the metropolitan areas of Atlanta and Detroit between the years 2000 and 2009. From there, the researchers calcluated death risk to exposure based on particulate matter for people in each national census district. Then, they statistically ruled out other variables impacting health and longevity including age, race or ethnicity, level of education, marital status, body size, alcohol consumption, how much participants smoked or not, and socio-economic factors such as median neighborhood income and how many people in the neighborhood did not graduate from high school.

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