Objective: To explore the association between the concentration of particulate matters with an aerodynamic diameter of < 10 microm (PM(10)) and the hospital emergency room visits for circulatory diseases (International Classification of Diseases, tenth vision ICD-10:I00-I99) in Beijing, China.
Methods: We collected data for daily hospital emergency room visits of circulatory diseases (ICD-10:I00-I99) from Peking University Third Hospital and from the ambient air PM(10) through the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center. A time-stratified case-crossover design was used to evaluate associations between circulatory disease health outcomes and PM(10).
Results: The no-lagged unidirectional case-crossover design with 1:4 matched pairs had the highest odds ratios (ORs) between PM(10) and the hospital emergency room visits for circulatory diseases. After adjusting the temperature and the relative humidity, a 10 microg/m(3) increased in the PM(10) were found associated with the emergency room visits on value of ORs of 1.006(95%CI: 1.003 - 1.008) for the total circulatory diseases (ICD-10:I00-I99), 1.003 (95%CI: 0.996 - 1.010) for coronary heart disease (ICD-10:I20-I25), 1.005 (95%CI: 0.997 - 1.013) for cardiac arrhythmia (ICD-10:I47-I49), 1.019 (95%CI: 1.005 - 1.033) for heart failure disease (ICD-10:I50), and 1.003 (95%CI: 0.998 - 1.007) for cerebrovascular diseases (ICD-10:I60-I69), respectively.
Conclusion: These findings suggested that elevated levels of ambient PM(10) were positively associated with hospital emergency room visits for the total number of circulatory diseases and heart failure disease.