Air Pollution Reduces the Individuals ’ Life Satisfaction Through Health Impairment

In this study, we examined the direct and indirect effect of air pollution on individuals’ LS throu gh health mediation. We used longitudinal individual-level data from “Understanding-Society: the UK Household-Longitudinal Study” on 59,492 individuals with 347,377 repeated responses across 11 years (2009–2019) that was linked to yearly concentrations of NO2, SO2, and particulate-matter (PM10, PM2.5) pollution. Generalized structural equation models with multilevel ordered-logistic regression were used to examine the direct effect of air pollution on LS and the indirect effect from health impairment.  Higher concentrations of NO2 (coefficient  = 0.009, 95%CI = 0.007,0.012,p <  0.001), SO2 (coefficient  = 0.025, 95%CI = 0.017,0.034,p <  0.001), PM10 (coefficient = 0.019, 95%CI = 0.013,0.025,p <  0.001), and PM2.5 (coefficient = 0.025, 95%CI = 0.017,0.033,p <  0.001) pollutants were associated with poorer health, while poorer health was associated with reduced LS (coefficient = -0.605, 95%CI = -0.614,-0.595,p <  0.001). Mediation path analysis showed that air pollution impacted individuals’ LS directly and indirectly. The percent of total effect mediated through health was 44.03% for NO2, 73.95% for SO2, 49.88% for PM10, and 45.42% for PM2.5 and the ratio of indirect to direct effect was 0.79 for NO2, 2.84 for SO2, 0.99 for PM10, and 0.83 for PM2.5.  Health plays a major mediating role in th...
Source: Applied Research in Quality of Life - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research