Time-Series Analysis of Air Pollution and Mortality: A Statistical Review

This report describes a study funded under the Walter A. Rosenblith New Investigator Award. Dr Francesca Dominici and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University developed more flexible methods and statistical models for the National Morbidity, Mortality, and Air Pollution Study database. The investigator used the database to obtain national estimates of air pollution that would be resistant to mortality displacement and to biases from modeling long-term trends inappropriately, to determine the time course of health events and testing the variability of these effects across locations and on different time scales, to establish how the components of measurement error in exposure variables might influence risk assessment, and evaluate the effects of at pollution on mortality and morbidity for elderly residents of the 10 largest cities. Dominici performed an extensive investigation into the effects of model choices and assumptions on the results of data analysis.