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Although clinicians treat individual patients and assess their unique risk factors for stroke, society-wide risk factors for vascular disease may also exist. One plausible factor is air quality, especially substantial air pollution. To examine this association on a large scale, researchers performed a meta-analysis of 94 studies that examined the relation between air quality and either admission to the hospital for stroke or stroke mortality. In total, 6.2 million events from 28 countries were included. The authors considered studies that reported daily measurements of air quality to be higher quality than studies with intermittent measurements.
Hospital admission or stroke mortality was significantly increased with incrementally increasing …