Long-term air pollution exposure associates with increased risk of coronary heart disease morbidity and mortality

An increasing number of studies underline the primary and secondary prevention for coronary heart disease (CHD) that were emphasized in the MONICA study decades ago.1 Identification of preventable risk factors is necessary to improve risk prevention. Nevertheless, researchers have paid relatively little attention to the impact of environmental pollution such as fine particulate matter (PM2.5), which is regarded as a modifiable factor.2 Thus, we conducted a systematic review to provide an overview and synthesis of existing evidence that detected the impact of long-term PM2.5 exposures on CHD quantitatively. This review was performed according to the PRISMA guidelines. Two reviewers (L.H. and L.X.) independently searched PubMed, Scopus, and EMBASE until December 2019 for all published studies. The detailed search strategy was listed in the Supplementary material online. Each search was limited to human studies and English language publications, which can be checked off on the...