The Association Between Ambient Ozone and Cardiac Arrest at a Fine Spatial and Temporal Scale

• Activity Number: 632
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 2, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Katherine Bennett Ensor*+ and Loren H. Raun
• Companies: Rice University and Rice University

Abstract

We investigate the association between short-term exposure to ambient ozone levels of ozone and the risk of an out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) in Houston, Texas. The method of analysis includes a time-stratified case-crossover study coupled with conditional logistic regression and captures the variation of pollution patterns in Houston throughout the day and across the City using a hierarchical spatial-temporal estimate of pollution levels. The dense ambient air-pollution and meteorological monitoring network and the knowledge of pollution patterns for the region, supports this innovative development of the case-crossover methodology to a temporal scale of one hour and a continuous spatial scale. Health information was obtained from a database of 6,812 cases representing all qualified OHCA events in which an ambulance responded in the City of Houston for the five-year period of 2004 to 2008. The findings identify areas within the City and time of day when citizens are at greater risk of this acute health endpoint.