Apples for Health- Americans living longer in cleaner air

Americans living longer in cleaner air

BOSTON, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- The average life expectancy in 51 U.S. cities increased nearly three years over recent decades -- five months came thanks to cleaner air, researchers said.

Researchers at Brigham Young University and Harvard School of Public Health matched two sets of data from 51 cities across the nation: changes in air pollution between about 1980 and about 2000; and residents' life expectancies during those years.

The scientists applied advanced statistical models to account for other factors that could affect average life spans, such as changes in population, income, education, migration, demographics and cigarette smoking.

In cities that had previously been the most polluted and cleaned up the most, the cleaner air added approximately 10 months to the average resident's life. On average, Americans were living 2.72 years longer at the end of the two-decade study period; up to five months, or 15 percent, of that increase came because of reduced air pollution, the study said.

"There is an important positive message here that the efforts to reduce particulate air pollution concentrations in the United States over the past 20 years have led to substantial and measurable improvements in life expectancy," study co-author Douglas Dockery of the Harvard School of Public Health said in a statement.

The findings are published in the New England Journal of Medicine.