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Review
. 2024 Jun 18:45:1606969.
doi: 10.3389/phrs.2024.1606969. eCollection 2024.

Two Decades of Air Pollution Health Risk Assessment: Insights From the Use of WHO's AirQ and AirQ+ Tools

Heresh Amini #  1   2 , Fatemeh Yousefian #  3 , Sasan Faridi #  4 , Zorana J Andersen  5 , Ellénore Calas  6 , Alberto Castro  7   8 , Karla Cervantes-Martínez  9 , Thomas Cole-Hunter  5 , Magali Corso  10 , Natasa Dragic  11 , Dimitris Evangelopoulos  12 , Christian Gapp  13 , Mohammad Sadegh Hassanvand  4 , Ingu Kim  14 , Alain Le Tertre  15 , Sylvia Medina  10 , Brian Miller  16 , Stephanie Montero  17 , Weeberb J Requia  18 , Horacio Riojas-Rodriguez  19 , David Rojas-Rueda  20   21 , Evangelia Samoli  22 , Jose Luis Texcalac-Sangrador  19 , Maayan Yitshak-Sade  1   2 , Joel Schwartz  23 , Nino Kuenzli  7   8 , Joseph V Spadaro  24 , Michal Krzyzanowski  25 , Pierpaolo Mudu  14
Affiliations
Review

Two Decades of Air Pollution Health Risk Assessment: Insights From the Use of WHO's AirQ and AirQ+ Tools

Heresh Amini et al. Public Health Rev. .

Abstract

Objectives: We evaluated studies that used the World Health Organization's (WHO) AirQ and AirQ+ tools for air pollution (AP) health risk assessment (HRA) and provided best practice suggestions for future assessments.

Methods: We performed a comprehensive review of studies using WHO's AirQ and AirQ+ tools, searching several databases for relevant articles, reports, and theses from inception to Dec 31, 2022.

Results: We identified 286 studies that met our criteria. The studies were conducted in 69 countries, with most (57%) in Iran, followed by Italy and India (∼8% each). We found that many studies inadequately report air pollution exposure data, its quality, and validity. The decisions concerning the analysed population size, health outcomes of interest, baseline incidence, concentration-response functions, relative risk values, and counterfactual values are often not justified, sufficiently. Many studies lack an uncertainty assessment.

Conclusion: Our review found a number of common shortcomings in the published assessments. We suggest better practices and urge future studies to focus on the quality of input data, its reporting, and associated uncertainties.

Keywords: AirQ; WHO; air pollution; burden of disease; health risk assessment.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they do not have any conflicts of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Flowchart demonstrating the steps involved in the literature search (Global, no restriction on start date-2022).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Temporal distribution of publications using all versions of AirQ and AirQ+ software (Global, 2002–2022).
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Geographic distribution and number of included studies by country [AirQ at the top and AirQ+ at the bottom; (Global, 2002–2022)].
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Numbers (percentage) of included studies using AirQ and AirQ+ software by air pollutant, and the source of air pollution data (Global, 2002–2022).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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