New research shows a link between the use of solid fuels at home and reduced lung function in people as they age.
The pollution from wood-burning stoves and open fireplaces may be causing their owners to lose valuable lung function at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the population. This new study is the first to use data that tracks home heating sources combined with health information over time to show this link and eliminate other factors.
Dr Laura Horsfall, Principal Research Fellow at the UCL Institute for Health Informatics, presented these findings at the recent European Respiratory Science Congress in Amsterdam. The data set used in this study is the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). This study has been collecting data on health, social and economic changes of people aged over 50 for over 20 years. Participants are monitored at two-yearly intervals, providing a range of data including physical measurements and blood tests.
The richness of information contained in the ELSA data was the key to the analysis performed by Dr Horsfall’s team when looking at who burns wood. Dr Horsfall said “At face value, you see that people who burn wood have better lung function, lower rates of cardiovascular disease, and lower rates of lung diseases, because of the protective effect of greater wealth”. This analysis is unique in having such detailed social, economic and household data for individuals with the long-term lung function measurements. This allows researchers to measure lung function decline and adjust for economic, social and health factors. These results suggest that the particulates emitted by open fires and wood-burning stoves contribute to declining lung function with age.
Particulate matter is anything in the air that is not a gas and includes dust, pollen, sea spray and particulate pollution. Large particles in the air may be trapped by nasal hairs when breathing, but smaller particles can pass into the lungs. Some particles will stay in the lungs, others are small enough to pass into the bloodstream, and the tiniest particles can cross the blood-brain barrier and lodge in the brain. Air pollution is the largest environmental risk to health in the UK and the small particle pollution (PM2.5) attributed to domestic solid fuel burning is 20% of the total PM2.5 pollution emitted in the UK in 2023. Long-term exposure to particulate matter has widely been acknowledged as a contributor to cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, stroke, cancer, mental illness and dementia. The economic cost of the health impacts of air pollution may be as high as £50 billion per year in the UK alone.
Jemima Hartshorn from Mums for Lungs said that people are getting mixed messages around wood burning, “if you go into a stove shop [the messaging] doesn’t say anything about health and it doesn’t have to. You can buy a Defra approved stove”.
This research, and an earlier study looking at the concentration of solid fuel burning in England and Wales form the first stages of a broader research project examining the health impacts of exposure to pollution from solid fuel burning appliances for people who use them, their neighbours, and the wider community. The next stage of this research will link the ELSA data with hospital admissions and respiratory treatment data for Wales, to investigate the short-term health impacts of wood burning across communities.
