+443308187254The majority of studies on the health effects of air pollution are based on outdoor ambient exposures, primarily due to the need to support emission control programs and the availability of population-based data. On the other hand, there is a sizable body of research on indoor air quality that focuses more on personal exposures. This assessment focuses on the effects of fine particles to combine these two aspects of pollution-related health effects. However, the fundamental ideas can be applied to any pollutant. The goals are to figure out how sensitive epidemiological studies are to including personal exposure information and how much data is needed to do so. Polluted outdoor air and a variety of indoor sources contribute to indoor air pollution, with environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) probably being the most toxic and widespread. There are sufficient data on air infiltration from the outside, but there are insufficient data on indoor sources and effects, and all of these data are based on surveys of small samples of individual buildings. Probabilistic methods must be used to aggregate these data because epidemiology is based on populations. Additionally, accurate estimates of the quality of the air in the surrounding area are required. In this paper, ranges of outdoor air quality, variable infiltration rates, and ranges of indoor source strength are used to generate hypothetical personal exposures. Two kinds of mortality studies are used to examine these uncertainties: cross-sectional analysis of annual mortality rates among locations and time series analysis of daily deaths in a given location. Using quasi-Monte Carlo techniques, effects on dose-response functions are examined using regressions of simulated mortality on personal exposures, which are affected by all of these uncertainties. The working hypothesis is that long-term cross-sectional studies are the only ones that can use indoor sources because they stay relatively constant over time. The simulated mortality regression coefficients are diminished by exposure uncertainty; The effects of "true" and hypothesized exposures are compared using correlations. Both types of simulated mortality studies have similar regression coefficient attenuation for a given level of exposure uncertainty; however, because cross-sectional studies use indoor sources, they are more sensitive, to the point where regression coefficients may be driven to zero. The distribution of indoor sources across cities, particularly for ETS, is the most pressing requirement for data confirmation.
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