Epidemiologia
Ambient Air Pollution and Asthma-Coded Hospital Admission Rates in Children Aged 0–3 Years in Spain: A Municipality-Year Urban–Rural Ecological Study
By Laura Sánchez de Prada, Daniel Vélez-Serrano and Alejandro Alvaro-Meca.
Abstract
Background/Objectives: Asthma-coded hospital admissions in very young children represent a clinically relevant but diagnostically complex marker of severe wheezing/asthma-like morbidity.
Methods
We conducted a nationwide ecological municipality-year study of children aged 0–3 years in Spain during 2020–2022 using hospital discharge records from the Spanish Minimum Basic Data Set (MBDS/RAE-CMBD). Exposure and outcome were analyzed at the municipality-year level: the exposure metric was the contemporaneous annual mean municipality-level concentration of PM2.5, PM10, NO2, SO2, O3, and CO, and the outcome was the annual number of asthma-coded admissions, with the population aged 0–3 years as offset.