I find this very hard to believe... Mind sharing that study?

Same. I hail from a particularly polluted (compared to the rest of the EU) country, so PM2.5 over 80µg/m3 during the entire heating season, NOx constantly above 50µg/m3 in cities due to old diesels with anti-pollution devices turned off or removed entirely and the overall effect is said to be a 3-6 years shorter life expectancy.

It checks out compared to countries without these issues, so 15 years to me sounds exaggerated, especially if we're talking about areas close to each other.

Such a huge shortening normally involves heavy metal pollution of the drinking water and soil.

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dash2 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, I mean, how do they identify the causal effect here? It's obviously not easy, because polluted areas are also poor areas, and poor people live in poor areas (and have other problems).

It would be nice if the article had mentioned this issue. A metastudy of lots of bad correlational studies is just garbage in garbage out. So, did they address the issue?

There are ways round it, by the way. As a recent review said:

"it is unclear why federal ISAs that are the input into all regulatory analyses tend not to incorporate the emerging body of evidence on the effects of air pollution on health outcomes from the economics literature despite the additional rigor imposed by the emphasis on causal inference."

https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/resource/15...

	▲	olalonde 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's not surprising that poverty affects life expectancy but what I find hard to believe is that poor air quality shortens life expectancy by a full 15 years.

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vallierx 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From a quick google search I'm guessing this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11097628/

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makeitdouble 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That sounds incredibly obvious on the face of it though ?

Having the study at hand is nice of course, but environnemental factors being alleviated through money and discriminatory policies is rampant enough I don't get the surprise.

People using high quality water filters or straight buy clean water tanks in areas where tap water is bad, getting better indoor air filtering, blocking construction of pollution sources to move them further away (near poorer areas) in the county, redlining/manipulateing zoning rules to make it systematic etc.

It's a old as humans.

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Manuel_D 6 days ago | parent [-]

15 years disparity in life expectancy exclusively attributed to air quality is not incredibly obvious. To put this in perspective, nationwide average disparity in life expectancy is 5 years between Black and white people. Triple that amount, exclusively attributed to air quality, is a substantial claim.

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olalonde 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly. Even smoking doesn't shorten life expectancy by that much (it's 10 years).

	▲	makeitdouble 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Smoking is voluntary, partly self-adjusting (willingly or not you'll reduce smoking as you get worse), composition is regulated and that habit only starts at a later stage in life. None of that applies to PM2.5 kind of pollution.

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makeitdouble 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

For an area that has well known air pollution issues it doesn't sound far-fetched.

Comparing to the national average helps put it into perspective but doesn't make sense as sanity check. Flynt could be a better data point.