Long-term exposure to ambient air pollution and lipid profiles: a longitudinal study in a heavily industrialized region of northern China.

Authors

Caiyun Sun, Xiaofeng Li, Yuanjia Miao, Jiayu Shen, Yang Jin, Feng Ma, Shigong Wang, Jingxin Li, Changxin Li

Published in

Frontiers in public health. Volume 14. Pages 1950282. Epub Oct 06, 2026.

Abstract

Dyslipidemia is an important modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular disease, and growing evidence suggests that long-term ambient air pollution exposure may adversely affect lipid metabolism. However, longitudinal evidence from heavily industrialized regions with complex multipollutant exposure remains limited.
We conducted a repeated-measures study of 9,040 adults with 19,113 lipid measurements from a health-screening program in Shanxi Province, China, between October 2019 and September 2023. Three-year average exposures to PM_2.5, PM₁₀, O₃, SO₂, NO₂, and CO were estimated using the high-resolution ChinaHighAirPollutants (CHAP) dataset based on geocoded residential addresses. Linear mixed-effects models and generalized linear mixed-effects models were used to evaluate associations with lipid profiles and dyslipidemia, respectively. Restricted cubic spline, stratified, sensitivity, and quantile g-computation-style mixed-effects analyses were further conducted.
Higher long-term exposure to PM_2.5, PM₁₀, O₃, NO₂, and SO₂ was associated with higher triglyceride (TG), total cholesterol (TC), and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) levels and lower high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) levels, whereas CO showed weaker associations. Among pollutants, PM_2.5 showed relatively pronounced associations; each 10 μg/m³ increase was associated with 1.85, 1.70, and 1.81% increases in TG, TC, and LDL-C, respectively, and a 1.55% decrease in HDL-C. Similar patterns were observed for dyslipidemia. Stratified analyses suggested potential effect modification by sex, age, and BMI for selected pollutant-lipid associations, with the most robust interaction signals observed for age-stratified HDL-C associations after false discovery rate (FDR) correction. The associations remained consistent in sensitivity analyses. Restricted cubic spline analyses suggested nonlinear exposure-response relationships between PM_2.5 and lipid parameters, while the quantile g-computation-style mixed-effects analysis indicated that multipollutant exposure was associated with adverse lipid profiles, with PM_2.5 and O₃ showing relatively large weights in the overall mixed-exposure association.
Long-term ambient air pollution exposure was associated with adverse lipid profiles and may be related to higher odds of dyslipidemia among adults in a heavily industrialized region of northern China. These findings suggest that ambient air pollution may be an important environmental factor associated with lipid metabolism and highlight the need to consider long-term multipollutant exposure in cardiometabolic health research and prevention strategies.

PMID:
42903168
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 22 Oct 2026.

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