Risk of Cardiorespiratory Mortality Associated with Emissions from a Cement Plant: A Residential Cohort Study

To evaluate the risk of cardiorespiratory mortality associated with exposure to air pollution produced by a cement plant, a population-based retrospective cohort study was conducted in an area of southern Italy (n = 29,495; follow-up 2006–2019; person-years = 317,810). Exposure areas were defined using the quartiles of the spatial distribution of the nitrogen oxide (NOx) mean concentration in 2016 as a proxy for the cement plant’s emissions and estimated using a meteorological–atmospheric dispersion model. The relationship between NOx and cause-specific mortality was quantified with time-dependent, sex-specific Cox regression analyses, controlling for age and proxies of socioeconomic deprivation and traffic pollution, accompanied by the confidence interval at 95% probability (CI95%) and an indicator (1 − p value) with values between 0 and 1, representing the likelihood of having a risk association. In the most exposed area, excesses of circulatory system diseases [men: HR = 1.60 (IC95% 1.24–2.06; 1 − p = 0.999); women: HR = 1.17 (0.93–1.48; 0.823)], heart diseases [men: HR = 1.66 (1.21–2.30; 0.998); women: HR = 1.24 (0.93–1.67; 0.855)], cerebrovascular diseases [men: HR = 2.11 (1.27–3.53; 0.996); women: HR = 1.52 (0.99–2.34; 0.946)], and acute respiratory diseases in women (HR = 2.46 (0.91–6.66; 0.924) were observed. The results, in line with the literature, suggest a deeper assessment of the potential impact of the cement plant, reinforcing the study design.