Temporal associations of ambient PM2.5 elemental concentrations with indoor and personal concentrations
Introduction
Particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5) has been associated with adverse health effects. However, less is known about which constituents of PM2.5 or which sources of particles are primarily responsible for these adverse health effects (Stanek et al., 2011, Kelly and Fussell, 2012, Rohr and Wyzga, 2012, Bell, 2012). The ambient concentrations of these components vary temporally due to changes in weather and emissions. For many epidemiologic air pollution time series studies, a central monitoring site is used to determine the exposure of study subjects. Previous studies have shown that the ambient concentrations of PM2.5 at a fixed site can be a good predictor for personal exposure, but the accuracy is dependent on the characteristics of participants, studies, and the environments in which they are conducted (Avery et al., 2010). Very few papers have investigated the short term temporal correlations between outdoor and personal elemental concentrations of PM2.5 (Janssen et al., 2005). A study in Amsterdam and Helsinki found that with the exception of sulfur and PM absorbance as a measure of Black Carbon, longitudinal correlations between personal and outdoor Cu, Zn, Fe, K, Ni, V, Si and S elemental concentrations were less than the correlations for PM2.5 which were 0.76 in Amsterdam and 0.74 in Helsinki (Janssen et al., 2005).
The aim of this paper is to assess the association between temporal variation in ambient concentrations of fine particle components at a central reference site and temporal variation in indoor and personal concentrations.
The study utilized repeated personal exposure measurements in Barcelona, Utrecht and Helsinki performed in the framework of the Validation of ESCAPE Exposure EstimateS using Personal exposure Assessment (VE3SPA) project (Montagne et al., 2013). VE3SPA was designed to evaluate how well land use regression models developed by the European Study of Cohorts for Air Pollution Effects (ESCAPE) project reflected spatial variation of outdoor, indoor and personal exposure (Eeftens et al., 2012b). The results for the spatial analyses have been published elsewhere for PM2.5, NO2 and soot (Montagne et al., 2013) and will be published elsewhere for the elemental composition.
Section snippets
Study design
PM2.5, soot (light absorbance of PM2.5 filters), NO2 and NOx were measured and the PM2.5 filters samples were chemically analyzed for elemental composition. Eight trace elements were a priori selected to represent different sources of air pollution, copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), iron (Fe), potassium (K), nickel (Ni), vanadium (V), silicon (Si) and sulfur (S). These eight elements were the elements selected in ESCAPE for land use regression modeling and epidemiological analysis (De Hoogh et al., 2013
Quality control
For most elements, more than 75% of the samples exceeded the detection limit (Table 1). For zinc (Zn) this percentage was slightly lower (68%), but was 100% if one extreme blank was excluded. This high blank measurement was excluded in all analyses. The coefficients of variance (CV) for the duplicate measurements, including the personal duplicate measurements, are shown in Table 2. CV values were fairly high, often exceeding 20%.
Descriptive results
The median, first and third quartile concentrations for the
Correlations with elemental exposure
Central site concentrations correlated well with home outdoor concentrations. Correlations were higher for S and V than for Cu, Fe and Si. The latter elements reflect the tail of coarse particles, which have more local sources compared to fine particles and therefore show different temporal patterns at different sites (close/far away from source) (Puustinen et al., 2007).
A statistically significant temporal relationship of the concentrations at a central site with personal concentrations was
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the volunteers for their participation and dedication in the project. The project was funded by Concawe (conservation of clean air and water in Europe), contract number 200907200, date 20-07-09.
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2022, Environmental ResearchCitation Excerpt :Previous studies conducted in the cities of United States (Baxter et al., 2007; Hasheminassab et al., 2014), Spain (Montagne et al., 2014; Rivas et al., 2015), China (Han et al., 2016) and Qatar (Saraga et al., 2017) reported strong correlation between indoor and outdoor concentrations of S (r ranging 0.88–0.95), BC (0.70–0.97) and Zn (0.53–0.97) as observed in this study. Baxter et al. (2007) and Montagne et al. (2014) reported strong indoor vs outdoor correlation for K (r ranging 0.72–0.89) similar to this study. BC and Zn are identified as exhaust and non-exhaust emissions respectively (Perrino et al., 2015; Jeong et al., 2019).