Associations between short-term exposure to ambient PM 2.5 and incident cases of cerebrovascular disease in Yantai, China

There are limited studies examining the association between PM 2.5 exposure and incident cerebrovascular disease (CD) cases in China. In this study, daily counts of incident CD cases and daily PM 2.5 concentrations were obtained in Yantai, Shandong Province, China from 2014 to 2019. We used a combination of the Poisson-distribution generalized linear model (GLM) and a distributed lag nonlinear model (DLNM) to examine the association of short-term exposure to ambient PM 2.5 and incident cases of CD. The results revealed that for every 10 μg/m 3 increment of PM 2.5 would increase the incident CD cases by 0.216% (RR:1.00216, 95%CI:1.0016–1.0028) at lag4. The stratified analysis demonstrated that the females and residents aged 65 years or above presented higher short-term PM 2.5 -associated CD risks than the males and aged below 65 years. Targeted prevention strategies should be adopted to reduce the PM 2.5 -related CD burden, especially for the susceptible population in China.