Time-series Analysis on Effects of Air Pollutants on Daily Mortality and Daily Outpatient Visits in Wuxi, China

Objective To study the effect of air pollutants on daily mortality and daily outpatient visits in Wuxi.

Methods The data of daily death air pollutants, meteorology and daily outpatient visits were collected from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2013 in Wuxi, the time-series analysis by generalized linear model of Poisson regression based on R foundation for statistical computing was employed for analyzing the effect of air pollutants on daily mortality and daily outpatient visits via controlling the long-term trends, seasonal patterns, meteorological variables, the week effect and other confounding factors.

Results An increase of 10 μg/m³ of PM_2.5, PM₁₀, SO₂ and NO₂ corresponded to 1.5%, 1.2%, 0.9% and 1.0% increase of daily mortality; corresponded to 0.7%, 0.6%, 0.3% and 1.1% increase of daily child outpatient visits; corresponded to 0.6%, 0.7%, 0.7% and 1.3% increase of daily adult outpatient visits respectively in Wuxi.

Conclusion The results of the present paper showed that the current level of air pollutants can increase the daily mortality and daily outpatient visits in Wuxi.