ELAPSE (Effects of Low-Level Air Pollution: A Study in Europe) is a Europe-wide collaboration in a research project Mortality and morbidity effects of long-term exposure to low-level PM2.5, Black Carbon, NO 2 and O 3 : an analysis of European cohorts . The Project is funded by Health Effects Institute under the RFA 14-3: Assessing Health Effects of Long-term Exposure to Low Levels of Ambient Air Pollution and runs from mid-2016 to mid-2019.
The Project addresses the issue of health effects at low air pollution levels by performing targeted analyses of all-cause and cause-specific mortality and morbidity endpoints within selected cohorts of the ESCAPE study with detailed individual data (~380,000 subjects) and in seven very large European administrative cohorts (> 35 million subjects). The analysis focuses on the pollutants PM2.5 (fine particles with an aerodynamic diameter of less than 2.5 μm), nitrogen dioxide ( NO 2 ), and ozone ( O 3 ), but
Epidemiological cohort studies have consistently found associations between long-term exposure to outdoor air pollution and a range of morbidity and mortality endpoints. Recent evaluations by the World Health Organization and the Global Burden of Disease study have suggested that these associations may be non-linear , and persist at very low concentrations . However, uncertainty about the shape of the concentration-response function exists especially for the low and high ends of the concentration distributi