A hospital-based cohort of 4,441 patients treated by radical surgery for stage I-III gastric cancer in Zhejiang between 2012 and 2022 linked modelled residential PM2.5 exposure over the 36 months before surgery to mortality after a median 3.83 years of follow-up. Each standard-deviation rise in PM2.5 carried an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.15 for all-cause death and 1.31 for gastric cancer-specific death, and the authors estimate 29.2% of all-cause deaths would be attributable to PM2.5 above the WHO 2021 guideline.
Why it is interesting: Places air pollution as a prognostic factor after a cancer diagnosis, not only as a determinant of who gets the disease.