Temperature-related mortality estimates after accounting for the cumulative effects of air pollution in an urban area

BACKGROUND: To propose a new method for including the cumulative mid-term effects of air pollution in the traditional Poisson regression model and compare the temperature-related mortality risk estimates, before and after including air pollution data. RESULTS: The analysis comprised a total of 56,920 residents aged 65 years or older who died from circulatory and respiratory diseases in Belgrade, Serbia, and daily mean PM(10), NO(2), SO(2) and soot concentrations obtained for the period 2009–2014. After accounting for the cumulative effects of air pollutants, the risk associated with cold temperatures was significantly lower and the overall temperature-attributable risk decreased from 8.80 to 3.00 %. Furthermore, the optimum range of temperature, within which no excess temperature-related mortality is expected to occur, was very broad, between −5 and 21 °C, which differs from the previous findings that most of the attributable deaths were associated with mild temperatures. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that, in polluted areas of developing countries, most of the mortality risk, previously attributed to cold temperatures, can be explained by the mid-term effects of air pollution. The results also showed that the estimated relative importance of PM(10) was the smallest of four examined pollutant species, and thus, including PM(10) data only is clearly not the most effective way to control for the effects of air pollution. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12940-016-0164-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.