American Heart Association volunteer expert, Joel Kaufman, M.D., MPH, is professor, Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, Medicine, and Epidemiology and Editor, Environmental Health Perspectives at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

Offering perspective on AHA Scientific Sessions 2020 Presentation P224
copyright American Heart Association 2020

"In addition to the actions that an individual takes to try to live healthy and prevent cardiovascular disease, like not smoking, controlling their diabetes and hypertension, controlling their cholesterol, being physically active. In addition, there are environmental factors that also turn out to be very important in the prediction of cardiovascular disease and increasing your risk of cardiovascular disease. One of those is ambient air pollution exposures, primarily air pollution from fossil fuel burning. What we've learned over the course of research over the last more than 20 years now is that living in areas that have higher concentrations of air pollutants, and then thus breathing more of the air pollutants, accelerates atherosclerosis and some of the other underlying processes, and leads to higher rates of cardiovascular disease. We do know that areas that have more green space, for example, also have lower air pollution levels, so that's something that we're interested in. But for the most part, the community-level interventions that need to be done to reduce air pollution are related to policy decisions that are made, locations of sources of air pollution and trying to have increasing controls over the sources of air pollution in that environment."