New research links wildfire smoke to increased risk of emergency room visits for people of all ages.

Annie Doubleday doesn’t want her work to scare people. It’s already unsettling when wildfire smoke descends upon a community, when eyes burn and throats scratch, and people trickle into emergency rooms. She’d rather people see her research, which ties wildfire smoke to an increased risk of emergency department visits, as a step toward protecting themselves.

“I think it’s useful to see it as more information, and use that to help us figure out what we can do to protect ourselves,” says Doubleday, who completed the research while working toward her doctorate in environmental health at the University of Washington and now works on air quality for the Washington State Department of Health.

“For me the takeaway is we’re all at risk of health impacts. Obviously some more than others, such as those with pre-existing respiratory or cardiovascular conditions, but we all should be taking steps to reduce exposure and watching for any symptoms.”

That’s the crux of two papers recently published in Environmental Research: Health, which found an increased risk of hospital service encounters in the days following wildfire smoke events. Taken together, their findings suggest that wildfire smoke poses a risk to people of all ages, not just young children and older adults.

The researchers found that the risk of respiratory-related emergency department encounters increased most sharply for those between the ages of 19 and 64. The findings suggest that public health messaging should also target younger and middle-aged adults, who may not see themselves as vulnerable to wildfire smoke.

“We do have this younger age group in there who may think they’re invincible, or that the risk messaging doesn’t apply to them because they’re not very young or elderly,” says Tania Busch Isaksen, teaching professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at and coauthor of both papers. Isaksen is also co-director of the Collaborative on Extreme Event Resilience, which has produced a string of papers on the risks of wildfire smoke.

“Knowing that essentially all age groups are at risk of negative health outcomes during wildfire smoke events is an important finding and a shift in how we think of who is vulnerable in our population during these events,” Busch Isaksen says. “I expect these results will be informative to public health risk communication strategies aimed at reducing wildfire smoke exposure in all age groups through behavior change such as limiting time outdoors, actively cleaning your indoor air, etc. ”

Read the full article about wildfire smoke at Futurity.