By Janet Raloff
Hospitals admit more patients for heart problems on days when air pollution is bad. A new study reveals that as airborne concentrations of fine dust particles climb, so do three blood factors that increase an individual’s heart attack risk.
Joel Schwartz of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston correlated blood data for more than 5,000 men and women with measurements of air pollution on the day their blood had been drawn. The randomly selected adults were among participants in a large federal survey on diet and health.