Short-term exposure to ambient air pollution and hospital visits for IgE-mediated allergy: A time-stratified case-crossover study in southern China from 2012 to 2019

BACKGROUND: Because of the limited epidemiological evidence on the association between acute air pollutants and allergy, there is a need to investigate this association, especially between the short-term exposure to air pollution and the serum Immunoglobulin E (IgE)-mediated allergy. METHODS: exposure on the risk of sensitization to specific inhalant/food allergens. Generalized additive models with multivariate adjustments were utilized to model the exposure-response relationship. Stratified analyses were performed to estimate the reliability of correlations in various subgroups. FINDINGS: ), as well as patients enrolled after 2017. INTERPRETATION: increases the number of hospital visits for IgE-mediated allergy, especially for the sensitization to specific inhalant allergens. Therefore, to prevent inhaled allergies, the public policy for controlling air pollution needs to be considered seriously. FUNDING: This study was supported by the University of Macau (grant numbers: FHS-CRDA-029-002-2017 and MYRG2018-00,071-FHS) as well as the Science and Technology Development Fund, Macau SAR (File no. 0004/2019/AFJ and 0011/2019/AKP). This work was also supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81,871,736), the National Key Technology R&D Program (2018YFC1311902), the Guangdong Science and Technology Foundation (2019B030316028), the Guangzhou Municipal Health Foundation (20191A011073), and the Guangzhou Science and Technology Foundation (201,804,020,043).