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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV1354

Psychiatric emergency visits are associated with daily air pollutant concentrations

PSYCHIATRIC EMERGENCY VISIT IS CORRELATED WITH THE DAILY AIR POLLUTANT CONCENTRATION

Daily nitrogen dioxide and PM2.5 levels show a significant but weak positive correlation with the daily number of psychiatric emergency visits, independent of meteorological factors.

The study aimed to quantify the association between daily concentrations of PM2.5, PM10, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and ozone (O3) and daily psychiatric emergency visits at a tertiary hospital in Taipei, while controlling for meteorological confounders. Using an ecological time-series design, the study examined 1,037 days between March 1, 2022, and December 31, 2024; the start date was aligned with the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in Taiwan to reduce pandemic-related confounding. The outcome variable was the daily number of psychiatric emergency visits obtained from the electronic records system of National Taiwan University Hospital, while exposure data consisted of daily averages obtained from the Ministry of Environment’s six monitoring stations in Taipei. Partial Pearson correlation was applied, simultaneously controlling for temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed, with a Bonferroni correction for four simultaneous tests (alpha=0.05/4=0.0125). NO2 showed the strongest association (r=0.11; p=0.00049), and PM2.5 also reached statistical significance (r=0.08; p=0.01209); by contrast, PM10 (r=0.05; p=0.09909) and O3 (r=0.01; p=0.74926) showed positive but nonsignificant trends. The authors state that the findings support a biologically plausible link between ambient air quality and acute psychiatric morbidity, independent of meteorological factors, and point to pollutant-specific mechanisms. From a clinical and policy perspective, they suggest that real-time air quality data could help predict increases in psychiatric emergency visits and support resource planning.

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