Further work will need to be carried out looking into this Alisertib mechanism possible link between urban/rural living environments and heart failure morbidity and mortality. It could be very revealing to carefully characterise this effect if it indeed exists, as it may be an indication of
unrecognised cardiovascular risk/protective factors associated with urban/rural living that exist within Warwickshire. However, it is also important to bear in mind that this is an ecological study and all the relationships picked up between variables in this study have been found using aggregate data at the ward level (number over 50 years of age, average IMD score, average air pollution across ward, overall numbers of deaths and hospital admissions due to heart failure). It is not always a trivial task to extrapolate the conclusions drawn
from such a study down to the level of individuals. Such a task would involve drilling down to individual level data and repeating the analysis, a task that was beyond the scope of this particular study. It is possible that the unexpected negative correlation between particulate matter air pollution and heart failure could disappear when data are analysed at the individual level—an example of an ecological fallacy. Consequently, it would be prudent to regard the results from the individual components of air pollution with cautious interest rather than viewing them as proof of any real effects. However, despite these caveats, this study has been able to provide some helpful information at the population level worthy of consideration. A health
inequality has been revealed, and the manner in which this inequality is influenced by age, social deprivation and the combined index of air pollution has been demonstrated. Such information should help inform policy decisions that would influence society at a population level and hopefully improve public health in the long run. There are some limitations in this study worth considering Anacetrapib that result from assumptions made along the way. A single air pollution measurement in 2010 was used and it was assumed that there was no significant change in this value over the 2005–2013 periods that mortality and hospital admission data were gathered from. The resulting cross-sectional nature of the study does not allow establishing temporality and thus causality of the observed associations. There was also no way to determine the length of time that individual members of the population within a ward had lived in that area, and thus how long they had been exposed to the measured ambient air pollution level. It was assumed that people with home addresses in a ward were exposed significantly to the levels of air pollution in that ward.