Associations between household airborne culturable fungi and allergies and airway illnesses in childhood in Shanghai, Ch
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Associations between household airborne culturable fungi and allergies and airway illnesses in childhood in Shanghai, China Wei Liu 1,2
&
Jiao Cai 3 & Chanjuan Sun 4 & Zhijun Zou 4 & Jialing Zhang 4 & Chen Huang 4
Received: 6 March 2020 / Accepted: 11 June 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Associations of household airborne fungi with allergies in childhood were inconsistent in the epidemiologic studies. During 2013–2014, we conducted a case-control study (phase two), which was nested in a cross-sectional study (phase one) during 2011–2012 in Shanghai, China. We inspected indoor air quality of 454 residences for 5–10 years old children. We defined cases as those children who were reported illnesses in the questionnaire of phase one or phase two and defined controls as those children who were not reported illnesses in both phases. A total of 436 living rooms and 445 bedrooms had valid data of household airborne fungi, and their mean concentrations were 301 cfu/m3 and 310 cfu/m3, respectively. In the multiple logistic regression analyses with adjusting for potential confounders, most associations of 16 studied illnesses with airborne fungi concentration were not statistically significant. Taking children in the 1st quartile that was stratified according to airborne fungi concentration in the living room as reference, only children in the 3rd quartile were significantly associated with a higher odd of lifetime-ever ear infections (adjusted OR, 95% CI 3.05, 1.29–7.21), and children in the 4th quartile were significantly associated with a higher odd of lifetime-ever wheeze (2.72, 1.28–5.75); but children in the 3rd quartile (0.33, 0.17–0.68) and in the 4th quartile (0.47, 0.23–0.97) were significantly associated with a lower odd of rhinitis in the past 12 months prior to the home inspection. Our results indicate that exposures to indoor airborne fungi in low concentrations seemingly have no significant impacts on the risks of most allergic and airway illnesses in childhood. Since families with sick participants might pay more attention to improve indoor air quality, effects of “avoidance behavior” on associations between indoor pollutants and childhood health should be considered in the data analysis and design of the nested case-control study. Keywords Airborne fungi . Asthma . Childhood . Case-control study . Residence . Threshold
Introduction Responsible editor: Lotfi Aleya Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-09717-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Chen Huang [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Institute for Health and Environment, Chongqing University of Science and Technology, Chongqing, China
2
School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Chongqing University of Science and Technology, Chongqing, China
3
Joint International Research Laboratory of Green Buildings and Built Environments (Ministry of Education), Chongqing University,
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