The effect of air pollution exposure on the risk of outpatient visits for periodontitis: a time-series study

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to determine if air pollution affected the risk of periodontitis outpatient visits. We collected the records of 56,456 periodontitis outpatient visits in Hefei, China, from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2021. The relationship between air pollution and periodontitis outpatient visits was evaluated using distributed lag nonlinear and generalized linear models. Additional analyses were performed, stratifying the data by age, season, and sex. Subgroup analyses showed a significantly higher risk of periodontitis outpatient visits due to NO₂ exposure during the warm season compared with the cold season. Moreover, O₃ exposure was associated with a lower risk of periodontitis outpatient visits in the cold season. The findings suggest that NO₂ exposure is associated with an increased risk of periodontitis outpatient visits, whereas O₃ exposure is associated with a decreased risk of periodontitis outpatient visits. Season is found to be an effect modifier in these associations.

KEYWORDS:

• Periodontitis
• air pollution
• time series

Acknowledgements

We appreciate all the staff and participants who helped with data access and collection for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Wuli Li, Xirun Zong and Yisheng He: writing original draft, data collection and formal analysis. Xinpai Liu, Chunhui Zhao: data curation, formal analysis and validation. Yuanyin Wang, Jing Zhang and Haifeng Pan: conceptualization, methodology, supervision, review, and editing. The final version has been reviewed, edited, and approved by all authors.

Data availability statement

The data supporting the study’s conclusions are available upon reasonable request.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09603123.2023.2253738

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Universities of Anhui province (KJ2020A0164) and Disciplinary Construction Project in School of Dentistry, Anhui Medical University (2021kqxkFY01, 2021kqxkFY09 and 2022xkfyts05).