Mokoena, Kingsley Katleho
Ethan, Crystal Jane
Yu, Yan
Shale, Karabo
Fan, Yameng
Liu, Feng
Rong, Jie
Article History
Received: 4 January 2019
Accepted: 14 May 2019
First Online: 3 June 2019
Compliance with ethical standards
:
: The study protocol for this research was accepted and approved by the Institutional Review Board at the School of Public Health, Health Science Centre, in Xi’an Jiaotong University. Written informed consent was not necessary or required, since aggregated data was used in the current study, and not individualized data. Patient information was anonymized before analysis.
: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
: The main strengths of our study are as follows: (1) assessing more pollutants in relation to circulatory mortality and (2) stratification of results by pollutant, gender, and age concerning circulatory mortality. In carrying out this time-series study, some limitations were encountered, and include the following: (1) As a proxy for personal exposure measurement, background ambient air pollutant levels were used in the current study. Consequently, this was expected to result in exposure measurement error which could possibly result in bias in terms of the risk estimates precision and strength.