A Spatial Analysis of Air Quality and Food Consumption Surrogates in Relation to Asthma Deaths: An Analytical Research

Objective: Asthma is among the most common diseases affecting more than 300 million people globally overall. Despite growing understanding of the association between the environmental and food intake markers and the etiology and progression of asthma, there is still unmet knowledge gap which requires further investigations to be done in a spatial and temporal manner. We carried out such a study to explore the association of air-quality markers, fruit and vegetable consumption and drinking water source trajectories with asthma death rate in spatial models. Material and Methods: Province-level data on asthma deaths, air-quality markers, namely, particular matter 10 and 2.5, sulfur-dioxide, carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen-dioxide, and ozone, drinking water source data from rivers, dams, wells, and springs as well as fruits and vegetables sales data were obtained for 81 provinces of Turkey for years 2018 and 2019. Mixed modelling approach taking into consideration the spatial autocorrelation was used to investigate the associations of these environmental and food consumption variables with asthma deaths. Results: These models revealed decreased asthma deaths with increased consumption of apple, banana, cabbage, lemon, onion, pineapple, spinach and zucchini, and increased asthma deaths with increased CO concentration and increased broad bean consumption. Conclusion: As a conclusion, we showed that spatial and temporal analyses have premise to offer much needed information to help close the knowledge gap in understanding the association of environmental and food intake markers with asthma deaths in granular spatial models. We have also showed that such efforts are possible by extracting publicly available data as well.