광양만권 주변지역 주민들의 대기오염 노출추정을 위한 방법론 비교 연구

The assessment of personal exposure is a critical component in population-based epidemiologic studies of air pollution. This study was conducted to apply and compare the four exposure estimation methods of individual-level to air pollution concentration in a cohort including 2,283 subjects in Gwangyang, Korea. Individual-level exposure of air pollution were estimated using multiple approaches, including average across all monitors, nearest monitor, and spatial interpolation by inverse distance weighting and kriging. The mean concentrations of PM10, NO2, SO2, CO, O3 by four exposure estimation methods were slightly different but not significantly different from each other. Cross-validation showed that kriging was more accurate than other exposure estimation methods because kriging has probably predicted individual exposure levels equivalent to residential locations after estimating the parameters of a model according to the spatial surface of air pollution concentration. These data support that spatial interpolation methods may provide better estimates than selecting the value from the nearest monitor and averaging across values from all monitors by reflecting spatial attributes of air pollution on personal level.