Living close to a street lamp ‘could predict if you’ll suffer deadly heart episode’
LIVING close to street lamps could predict your risk of a deadly heart attack episode.
Usually people who live among bright-lit streets are in an urban area, like a city or town.
These areas are most polluted - and toxic air is directly linked with cardiac arrests.
A cardiac arrest is when the heart stops, sometimes for no apparent cause. It is different from a heart attack, when blood supply is cut to the heart.
In the UK there are over 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) a year, and just one in 10 people survive.
A new study in Italy has found that the more pollutants are in the air on any given day, the more cardiac arrests are suffered in the population.
“We studied seven common pollutants and found that as the concentration of each rose, the risk of cardiac arrest increased,” said study author Dr. Francesca R. Gentile of the IRCCS Policlinico San Matteo Foundation, Pavia, Italy.
“The findings suggest that air quality should be incorporated into predictive models to assist health systems in planning service requirements.”
Pollution irritates blood vessels through oxidative stress, which then can increase blood pressure, risk of heart attacks, heart failure, stroke and diabetes, and has been likened to smoking.
The study was conducted in the provinces of Pavia, Lodi, Cremona and Mantua in southern Lombardy, covering more than 1.5 million inhabitants in both rural and urban areas.
Over a study period in 2019, 1,582 people had cardiac arrests, not including in hospitals.
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Concentrations of five concerning pollutants were higher on the days with most cardiac arrests.
These were PM10, PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, benzene, and sulphur dioxide - all of which are known to harm human health.
PM2.5 and nitrogen dioxide are the two pollutants of biggest concern in London, for example.
Dr Gentile said: “The observed relationships between concentrations of individual pollutants and the likelihood of cardiac arrest could be used in future to predict the incidence of this life-threatening condition in specific geographical areas.”
“We hope that air pollutant monitoring can improve health service efficiency by being factored into ambulance forecasting models and warning systems.
“In addition to being a threat to the ecosystem, evidence is accumulating that dirty air should be considered a modifiable factor that contributes to cardiovascular disease.”
The research is being presented at ESC Congress 2021 and is not yet published.
What's the link?
Dozens of studies have tied city-living to the devastating impacts of air pollution.
A study in January of 2020, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, found that cardiac arrest risk increased by up to four per cent for every 10 µg/m3 increase in PM2.5.
Higher air pollution days trigger an additional 124 cardiac arrests across the nine major UK cities, according to a King’s College London study, as well as 231 strokes and 193 asthma hospitalisations.
It’s not just the impact on heart health that’s a worry, as pollution is linked to obesity and high blood pressure in children, dementia, Covid severity, asthma attacks and mental illness.
“Air quality tends to be worse in cities than elsewhere in the country and is the largest environmental risk to public health in the UK, causing an estimated 40,000 deaths each year,” Centre for Cities says.
It notes that among the UK’s cities, the South East suffers the greatest burden of pollution, thought to be down to contributions from Europe.
Traffic and burning fuel is the biggest contributor to toxic city air.
The World Health Organization (WHO) now calls urban pollution levels a “public health emergency”.
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More than half of the world’s population live in urban areas.
However, it urges for monitoring in the rural parts of the world too, given that overall, nine in 10 people are breathing air that exceeds WHO air quality recommendations.