A Method to Identify Regional Particulate Matter Sources and Their Health Effects

• Activity Number: 68
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 3, 2014 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: ENAR
• Author(s): Jenna R. Krall*+ and Amber Hackstadt and Roger D. Peng
• Companies: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Keywords: particulate matter sources ; health effects ; source apportionment ; factor analysis

Abstract

Determining whether different sources of particulate matter (PM) air pollution vary in toxicity is critical for the study of PM pollution. To estimate regional associations between PM sources and adverse health outcomes, it is necessary to pool estimated health effects across monitors. Pooling estimated health effects of PM sources is challenging because PM sources are frequently estimated separately for each monitor and PM sources vary spatially. Ad-hoc approaches are applied to pool source information across monitors, but these methods become infeasible for large, regional studies. We developed a novel approach for identifying major PM sources shared across monitors that guides pooling source information. First, our method estimates the chemical composition of PM sources at monitors using a principal component analysis (PCA) approach. Then, the method extracts major PM sources using a second-level PCA. The resulting database of major PM sources guides pooling source information across multiple monitors. Using data for 63 counties in the northeastern US, we used our method to conduct the first regional study of associations between major PM sources and hospitalizations.