Health effects of air pollution in worldwide countries: an ecological study

Air pollution is one of the health problems worldwide. Previous epidemiological studies have investigated the impacts of air pollution on respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The aim of this study was to determine the associations between air pollution levels and different health indicators among world countries.
This ecological study was performed in 2013 by using dataset of World Health Organization (WHO). The main variable in our study was air pollution index. The data including Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) (per 100000 live births), Life Expectancy at birth (LE), preterm birth rate (per 1000 live births) and Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD) death rate (per 100000 populations) from 91 countries were extracted. Pearson correlation coefficient was used to assess the linear correlation between air pollution and investigated indexes using Stata 11.
MMR (r=0.36, P=0.001) and NCD death rate (r=0.31, P=0.002) were positively associated with air pollution level. The rate of air pollution was also negatively associated with LE among world countries (r=-0.57, P=0.001). Our findings have not shown any significant liner association between air pollution and preterm birth rate (r=0.14, P=0.41).
Our results are in agreement with other recent findings that there is an association between air pollution and health indexes, especially mortality rate. Accordingly, from a public health perspective, reducing pollutant emissions to outdoor air should be a high priority for all countries.