A study appearing in the January 22nd issue of the New England Journal of Medicine brings encouraging news about our ongoing efforts in the United States to clean up the air and how these actions have helped improve the average life expectancy age in 51 U.S. cities.
It seems that improving the quality of the air we breathe may well be paying off, dramatically increasing the average life span according to research conducted by a team from Brigham Young University and the Harvard School of Public Health.
Epidemiologist and lead study author C Arden Pope III of BYU and Douglas Dockery of the Harvard School of Public Health have collaborated before on landmark studies that revealed the negative effects of particulate air pollution or PM2.5. The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency used the work of these experts, and others, to tighten air pollution standards back in 1997.
Knowing that the United States has made some substantial efforts over the years to improve the air quality of its cities, the team wondered if these changes had made any difference in terms of life expectancy of the population.
The detailed analysis led by Pope and Dockery set out to find an answer; to see if there were measurable results from all those efforts to improve the quality of our air.
The team of researchers evaluated pollution data that had been collected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and compared this to health statistics from the years 1980 to 2000.
The experts used advanced statistics to account for other factors that might affect life span – things like population, income, education, migration, demographics and cigarette smoking.
At the end of the study period, it was found that Americans were living 2.72 years longer, and up to 5 months (about 15%) of that can be attributed to breathing less polluted air.
The study found that cleaner air added about 10 months to an average residents life in cities where pollution had been particularly bad.
During the 1980s and 90s the levels of pollution in the 51 cities used in the study dropped from a high of 21 to a low of 14 micrograms of particulate pollution per cubic meter.
“Such a significant increase in life expectancy attributable to reducing air pollution is remarkable,” says C. Arden Pope III, PhD of BYU. “We find that we’re getting a substantial return on our investments in improving our air quality.”
Even in places where air quality had been relatively good, life expectancy increased when more improvements were made.
Ongoing efforts to keep air clean clearly have some benefit.
The researchers suspect that the longevity gains are coming from fewer problems with cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary conditions that are usually seen in patients living with air pollution.
“There is an important positive message here that the efforts to reduce particulate air pollution concentrations in the United States over the past 20 years have led to substantial and measurable improvements in life expectancy,” says study co-author Douglas Dockery, ScD, of the Harvard School of Public Health.
Of course the researchers are quick to point out that there are many factors that influence life expectancy clean air being but one.
The good news is that this latest analysis has shown that by improving air quality in our cities we can (and have) positively impacted the average life expectancy age.
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