Attributable risk of ambient PM10 on daily mortality and years of life lost in Chengdu, China

Abstract Attributable risk is an important indicator for planning and evaluating public health interventions. However, most current measures of the attributable risk of air pollutants have not considered temporal relationships between exposure and risk. More importantly, limited information is available regarding the attributable risk due to ambient air pollutants in basin regions like the Sichuan Basin, China. To quantify the association between PM 10 and deaths in the Basin region, we used a measure proposed recently within the framework of the distributed lag non-linear model to estimate the attributable risk in Chengdu, China. Meanwhile, we examined the association between PM 10 and years of life lost (YLL). Our analysis showed that population-attributable fractions for non-accidental, respiratory, and cardiovascular mortality were 0.569% (95% CI: − 3.474%, 4.374%), 0.695% (95% CI: − 5.260%, 6.457%), and 0.631% (95% CI: − 6.973%, 7.390%), respectively. On average, a 1 μg/m 3 increase in PM 10 was associated with cumulative increases of 0.26893, 0.30437, and 0.21924 YLL for non-accidental, respiratory, and cardiovascular mortality, respectively, referring to 20 μg/m 3 . In addition, we found an inverse U-shaped pattern for the cumulative risk with 350 μg/m 3 as the reverse point. With a 1 μg/m 3 increase in PM 10 , YLL changed more significantly than mortality. Moreover, PM 10 demonstrated remarkable effects on YLL among men and the elderly.