Air quality in Tehran, Iran: Evaluating acute health effects and modeling the long-term spatial variability

Air pollution in low- and middle-income countries is higher and from different sources than air pollution in high-income countries, where most exposure and epidemiologic research has been done. The burden of air pollution could be very large through acute and chronic effects. This project focuses on these two key challenges and bridges research on short-term daily exposure and its effects, and the assessment of long-term exposure spatial pattern in Tehran, Iran.

The objectives of this project are 1) to evaluate the acute health effects in Tehran, and 2) to estimate the long-term spatial variability of air pollutants in Tehran for future use in cohort studies. We will first evaluate in a time-series analysis the acute health effects of the air quality index, constructed of daily air quality data of a set of pollutants (PM10, PM2.5, SO2, NO2, O3, and CO). The vision is to translate the daily air quality into daily burden of death attributable to air pollution as a novel way. We further will monitor air quality in Tehran for one year and afterwards will model spatial patterns of measured air pollutants (namely NO2, SO2, O3, and BTEX) to estimate long-term exposures. This study will shed light on the acute health effects of air pollution and the related daily public health burden. Furthermore, results of this work will open up new avenues for next generation of air pollution monitoring, modelling, and epidemiology in Iran.

Involved Regions: Europe and Central Asia
Involved Countries: Iran (Islamic Republic of)

• http://ier.tums.ac.ir/