Effects of long-term exposure to traffic-related air pollution on respiratory and cardiovascular mortality in the Netherlands

Research Report 139 describes a study in the Netherlands using data from the ongoing Netherlands Cohort Study (NLCS) on diet and cancer. The study is one of the first to systematically assess longer term exposure and mortality in a well characterized European population; it followed a pilot study of 5000 adults randomly selected from the NLCS cohort conducted by the same team of investigators. For the current study, Dr. Bert Brunekreef and colleagues refined the methods of exposure assessment, included more traffic data, and extended the mortality analyses to the full NLCS cohort (~120,000 individuals) for a longer follow-up period.