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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 13|pp 17818—17829

Particulate matter exposure is highly correlated to pediatric asthma exacerbation

Xin Yang1, Yuanyuan Zhang1, Xueqin Zhan1, Xuchen Xu1, Shuxian Li1, Xuefeng Xu2, Songmin Ying3,4, Zhimin Chen1
  • 1Department of Pulmonology, Children's Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, National Clinical Research Center for Child Health, National Children's Regional Medical Center, Hangzhou 310052, China
  • 2Department of Rheumatology Immunology and Allergy, Children's Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, National Clinical Research Center for Child Health, National Children's Regional Medical Center, Hangzhou 310052, China
  • 3Department of Pharmacology and Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine of the Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Key Laboratory of Respiratory Disease of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou 310009, China
  • 4International Institutes of Medicine, The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Yiwu 322000, China
* Equal contribution
Received: December 5, 2020Accepted: June 1, 2021Published: July 13, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203281

Copyright: © 2021 Yang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Asthma is a heterogeneous disease in which environmental factors play an important role, and the effect of particulate matter (PM) on the occurrence and severity of asthma is drawing more attention. This study aims to identify the correlation between PM and pediatric asthma exacerbation and explore the potential mechanisms. The asthma visits data (N = 16,779,739) in a university-based tertiary children’s hospital from January 2013 to December 2017 were collected, and the relationship between asthma visits and local PM concentration was analyzed. For further study, we established a house dust mite (HDM)-induced allergic airway inflammation model with PM intervention. We detected a correlation between PM concentration and pediatric asthma visits, especially in children under 6 years old. The in vivo data showed that PM aggravated HDM-induced airway inflammation, and IL-33 neutralizing antibody exerted a protective role. Our study suggests that PM is a risk factor in promoting pediatric asthma exacerbation, in which IL-33 might be a promising target.