© 2005 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd & British Thoracic Society
EDITORIAL
Air pollution and heart rate variability
The way to dusty death?
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr J N Townend
Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham B15 2TH, UK; john.townend@uhb.nhs.uk
"Environmental cardiology"—the relationship between air pollution, autonomic control, inflammation, and adverse cardiac events
Keywords: air pollution; coronary artery disease; heart rate variability
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
As cardiologists know to their cost, the course of coronary artery disease is highly unpredictable. Although the disease accounts for about 20% of all deaths in developed countries and high levels of morbidity, in most cases the disease is clinically silent. Autopsy studies reveal that more than half of all people over the age of 60 and over a quarter of adults under this age have coronary artery disease. Even when this is manifest as angina, the annual event rate is only about 3%. When adverse events occur, however, they usually do so without apparent cause and without warning. About half of the deaths due to coronary artery disease are sudden and, of these, half are due to plaque rupture and intracoronary thrombosis.1 In the remainder, although severe coronary artery disease is often present, no evidence of thrombus is found at autopsy and the
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