Should Household Air Quality Monitoring Be Considered in Selected Asthma & COPD Patients?
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Background
Indoor air quality (IAQ) is an actionable determinant of respiratory health. Low-cost sensors (LCS) could enable scalable, patient-centred assessments, but real-world clinical utility is uncertain.
Objective
Evaluate the feasibility and usability of home IAQ monitoring with LCS and synthesise lessons directly relevant to clinical management.
Methods
We conducted an ambispective cohort study involving 205 adults with COPD, bronchiectasis, or asthma. Household IAQ was profiled prospectively over two months using LCS that logged CO 2 , PM 2.5 and formaldehyde every 10 minutes. For each pollutant, dwellings were classified as Good, Moderate or Unhealthy according to the Global Open Air Quality Standards thresholds. Clinical surveillane were conducted over the preceding 12 months, with pulmonary exacerbations requiring hospitalization as the primary endpoint and all-cause emergency department visits as an exploratory endpoint.
Results
More than half of homes (92; 51.7%) had at least one pollutant in an at-risk category. The burden was driven by PM 2.5 : 40.1% of dwellings were classified as at risk (32.8% Moderate; 7.3% Unhealthy). Formaldehyde exceeded the low-risk threshold in 22 homes (12.4%). The prevalence of smokers rose steeply across PM 2.5 categories (p<0.001). Despite this high prevalence of at-risk IAQ, the distribution of IAQ categories was comparable between patients with and without hospitalised exacerbations; a similar pattern was observed for all-cause ED visits.
Conclusion
1) LCS show stable, near-linear performance, enabling reliable detection of IAQ trends. They are well-suited for IAQ risk screening, but continuous long-term monitoring is not cost-efficient. 2) Impaired IAQ is a prevalent phenomenon, PM 2.5 driven and strongly linked to indoor smoking. 3) IAQ risk categories did not associate directly with unplanned hospitalisations, instead, risk was driven by multimorbidity burden, pulmonary disease severity, and history of previous events.
Registration
NCT06421402.
