Fine pollutant particles raise risk of lung cancer, study finds
Scientists find exposure to particulate air pollution raises risks, even at low concentrations
Long-term exposure to particulate air pollution boosts the risk of lung cancer, even at concentrations below the legal maximum, said a European study published yesterday.
European epidemiologists said they had found an unmistakable link between lung cancer and localised air pollution by particulate matter.
The evidence comes from 17 high-quality investigations carried out among 312,000 people in nine European countries, according to the paper in .
These earlier studies, which had already been published, were based on reliable records of the health and lifestyle of 2,095 people who died from lung cancer during an average 13-year monitoring period.
The team sourced environmental data around the individuals' home addresses, then calculated their exposure to levels of particulate matter - the gritty residual pollution from fossil-fuel-burning power stations, cars and factories.
Particulate matter falls into two categories: PM2.5, meaning particles measuring no more than 2.5 micrometres, 30 times smaller than a human hair, and the slightly coarser variant, PM10.
Current EU air quality standards limit PM10 exposure to a yearly average of 40 micrograms per cubic metre, and PM2.5 exposure to 25 micrograms per cubic metre per year.
The UN's World Health Organisation has guidelines recommending that annual exposure be limited to 20 micrograms per cubic metre for PM10 and 10 micrograms per cubic metre for PM2.5
Unexpectedly, the new study found a cancer risk at every level, and confirmed that the higher the level, the greater the risk.
The results took account of smoking, diet and occupation - which can skew the risk picture.
"We found no threshold below which there was no risk," said Ole Raaschou-Nielsen from the Danish Cancer Society Research Centre in Copenhagen.
"The more the worse, the less the better."
Every increase of five micrograms per cubic metre of PM2.5 drove the risk of lung cancer up by 18 per cent.
And every increase of 10 micrograms per cubic metre of PM10 boosted risk by 22 per cent, including for adenocarcinoma, a type of lung cancer associated with non-smokers.
In an independent comment, Jon Ayres, a professor of environmental and respiratory medicine at the Institute of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in Birmingham, central England, praised the design and scope of the study.
"There is now no doubt that fine particles are a cause of lung cancer," he told the Science Media Centre in London.
In a separate study in , scientists at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland carried out a meta-analysis of 35 studies in 12 countries.
It looked at PM2.5, PM10 and four air pollutants: carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone.
They found that even a brief spike in exposure - the kind that happens when a city calls a smog alert - caused the risk of hospital admission or death from heart failure to rise by two or three percentage points. The only exception was ozone, a well-known respiratory irritant at the ground level.
