Research Reports

This report describes research funded under HEI's Air Toxics Hot Spot program. Dr. Eric Fujita and colleagues characterized concentrations of mobile-source air toxics (MSATs) and other pollutants in potential Los Angeles County pollution hot spots, including on urban highways with a varying mix of gasoline- and diesel-powered traffic and sites at various distances from the highways and close to other roads.

This report explores how land-use regression and source-apportionment techniques can be used to characterize individual-level exposure to both indoor and outdoor air pollution sources. Dr. Levy and colleagues utilized health and air monitoring data from an ongoing prospective cohort study on childhood asthma in Boston, Massachusetts to model variability in outdoor and indoor residential air pollution, identify potential sources, and evaluate the effectiveness of various indoor exposure surrogates for predicting childhood asthma development.

This report explores the possible physiological basis for epidemiologic results suggesting that people over the age of 55 are more sensitive than younger people to the effects of exposure to particulate matter. Dr. Debra Laskin and colleagues hypothesized that this sensitivity resulted from the lung cells of the elderly producing less of the cytokine tumor necrosis factor-α (a cell protein involved in systemic inflammation), as compared with the lung cells of the young after exposure to air pollution.

This report describes a study by Dr. Thomas Cahill and colleagues to create and evaluate a new method to measure acrolein and other volatile carbonyls present at low concentrations in ambient air. Acrolein is an important aldehyde that is very difficult to measure accurately, so developing better methods for measuring levels and exposure is critical to better risk assessment for the chemical. The investigators developed a sampler that traps acrolein using sodium bisulfite in an aqueous medium.