Air pollution, the underestimated cardiovascular risk factor: The original manuscript published in EHJ from Jos Lelieveld and Thomas Münzel came in position 72 of the top 100 papers of the Altmetric Top 100 score for 2019. The Altmetric worldwide ranking was the result of tracking 62.5 million mentions of 2.7 million research outputs. The result highlights the popularity of the Lelieveld / Münzel article

Extract

A team of scientists headed by Professor Jos Lelieveld of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and Professor Thomas Münzel of the Mainz University Medical Center has recently revealed that air pollution shortens the average life expectancy of Europeans by about 2 years.¹ According to the study, around 120 people per 100 000 population die prematurely from the effects of air pollution on a global scale. The corresponding figure for Europe stands at 133 per 100 000 population, which thus exceeds the global average. They also demonstrate that cardiovascular diseases are the cause of death in at least half the incidents (Figure 1).

With our article, we adjusted the most recent calculations of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD), a worldwide health assessment, as well as our own estimates, substantially upward. Until recently, it had been assumed that the global premature mortality rate due to air pollution was around 4.5 million people a year. The recalculated value puts that figure at 8.8 million per year as already demonstrated by Burnett et al. in 2018.² In Europe alone, nearly 800 000 people die prematurely every year as a result of air pollution. It became necessary to update the calculations, as a recently published study placed the disease-specific hazard functions well above those of the GBD. These functions now include disorders that were not explicitly included previously, such as diabetes and hypertension, which aggravate cardiovascular disease. Because the study incorporated 41 large-scale case-group investigations from 16 countries, including China, it provides the best database currently available, says Jos Lelieveld, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.