This topic represents one of the research streams of the D-Hygea Lab (Digital Solutions for Health Prevention)at the Department of Electronics, Information and Biomedical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. The group, led by Prof. Enrico G. Caiani, is focusing its efforts in the field of health prevention, towards SDG 3 (Good health andwell-being) and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), pursuing it indifferent contexts: mobile health and engagement personalization towards increased adherence, data analytics tools to support medical device regulatory approach to increase patient safety, and health geomatics applied to publichealth.
Specifically for this last context, one PhD student at SDC (Amruta Mahakalkar), one PhD student in DataAnalytics and Decision Science at Politecnico di Milano (Julia Nawaro), and oneResearch Assistant (Dr. Lorenzo Gianquintieri) are focusing their activities, also in collaboration with Prof. Maria Brovelli and her team at GISGeoLab atPolitecnico di Milano.
The diverse expertise of this group, including both biomedical and environmental engineering, data science,and urban planning, represents a quality factor in approaching the problem of understandingthe complex implications of environmental risk factors, notably atmosphericpollution and heat waves, on human health from a multifaceted point of view.
The group has established along-standing collaboration with the Agenzia Regionale Emergenza Urgenza (AREU) in Milan, responsible for the management of the emergency services in the whole Lombardy Region. Accordingly, our research is mainly focusing on conducting risk assessments to highlight possible links of exposure factors and theirspatiotemporal effects to cardiovascular and respiratory events in such Region,counting more than 11 Million residents, and being one of the most pollutedparts of Italy (and Europe).
Lombardy Region, due to its location in Po River valley and highly urban characteristic, is in fact prone to unhealthy levels of air pollution and increasingly prevalent climate change phenomena, particularly heat waves. Our team is conducting retrospective studies on the risk of air pollution and heat waves on cardiovascular and respiratory emergencies across Milan and its surrounding areas, using data from the emergency services, considering geo-localized ambulance dispatches as proxy signal for detecting the underlying phenomena.
Recently, we published two systematic reviews on the effects of air pollution [1] and heat waves[2] on cardiovasculardiseases. Furthermore, we demonstrated an increase in cardiovascular events during heat waves in the city of Milan [3]. The latest systematic review unveiled a significant association between PM2.5 and hospitalization due to all-cause cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, neighbourhood level confounders such as socio-economic and built environmental variables were found tosignificantly modify the effect in particular contexts. Our research underscoresthe imperative for a multi-disciplinary approach to public health and sustainable development, aligning with the One Health framework.
With the same research group, we are now involved in the Anthem project ,with a specific task investigating the link between health and pollution.