Evaluating Race in Air Pollution and Health Research: Race, PM 2.5 Air Pollution Exposure, and Mortality as a Case Study.

Autor: Hicken MT; Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 426 Thompson Street3358 ISR, Ann Arbor, MI, 48106, USA. mhicken@umich.edu., Payne-Sturges D; School of Public Health, Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health, University of Maryland, 255 Valley Drive, College Park, MD, 20742, USA., McCoy E; School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, 440 Church Street; 4503 Dana, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Current environmental health reports [Curr Environ Health Rep] 2023 Mar; Vol. 10 (1), pp. 1-11. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Jan 23.
DOI: 10.1007/s40572-023-00390-y
Abstrakt: Purpose of Review: Racial inequities in air pollution exposure have been documented. There is also interest in documenting the modifying role of race in the link between air pollution and health. However, the empirical literature in this area has yielded mixed results with potentially unclear policy implications. We critically evaluate recent empirical papers on the interactive association between race and air pollution exposure on adult mortality in the USA as a case study of the race, pollution, and health literature. Specifically, we evaluate these studies for the conceptualization and discussion of race and the use of race variables that may contribute to the ambiguous results and policy implications both in this specific literature and in the broader literature.
Recent Findings: We evaluate ten empirical studies from 2016 to 2022 on the modifying role of race in the association between short- and long-term PM 2.5 exposure and specific types of adult mortality (all cause, non-accidental, and heart or cardiovascular diseases) in the USA. In addition to comparing and contrasting the empirical results, we focus our review on the conceptualization, measurement, modeling, and discussion of race and the race variables. Overall, the results indicate no consistent role of race in the association between PM 2.5 exposure and mortality. Moreover, conceptualization and discussion of race was often brief and incomplete, even when the empirical results were unexpected or counterintuitive. To build on recent discussions in the epidemiology and environmental epidemiology literature more specifically, we provide a detailed discussion of the meaning of race, the race variables, and the cultural and structural racism that some argue are proxied by race variables. We use theoretical scholarship from the humanities and social sciences along with empirical work from the environmental literature to provide recommendations for future research that can provide an evidence base to inform both social and environmental policy.
(© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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