According to a new study, environmental factors such as air pollution are strongly predictive of death, specifically from stroke or heart attack.
Researchers from New York University’s (NYU) Grossman School of Medicine and Mount Sinai Hospital’s Icahn School of Medicine conducted the peer-reviewed study, which was published in the journal PLOS One.
The researchers gathered information on individual and environmental risk factors for 50,045 people, the majority of whom were economically disadvantaged villagers in Iran’s Golestan region, ranging in age from 40 to 75 years, in order to include people with higher rates of untransmittable diseases such as esophageal cancer.
“Our study emphasises the role that key environmental factors such as indoor/outdoor air pollution, access to modern health services, and proximity to noisy, polluted roadways play in all causes of death, particularly deaths from cardiovascular disease,” said lead author and cardiologist Dr. Rajesh Vedanthan, an associate professor in the Departments of Population Health and Medicine at NYU Langone Health.
“Our findings contribute to expanding the illness risk profile beyond age and established personal risk variables,” he said.
