For this assignment, each member of your group will be investigating a different cardiovascular or respiratory disease. Each person in your group should focus on a different disease, so before you write your post, check to see which diseases have been taken. You may choose to “call dibs” on your disease before by posting which disease you will take.

• Ischemic heart disease
• Cerebrovascular disease
• Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
• Pneumonia

Be sure to write the answers to the following questions in your own words. Please also cite all sources fully, including in-text citations and a full reference list at the end, for full credit.

Post Requirements

This assignment requires a single post. Title your post with the name of the disease you are investigating.

1. Provide an overview of the disease that addresses the questions below. You may use bullet points for your response. Be sure to provide citations, where applicable.
   • What are the key characteristics of your disease?
   • What organs and body systems are affected?
   • What are the symptoms?
   • List the primary risk factors for your disease.
2. The four graphs below show how more exposure to air pollution (X-axis) can increase the risk of dying from specific diseases (Y-axis). However, the risk of dying does not increase at a constant rate as air pollutants become more concentrated. For this question, look at the graph for your selected disease and quantify how much the risk ratio (risk of mortality; bold solid line) changes from a pollutant concentration of 0 g/m3 to 25 g/m3. In other words, what happens to the risk of mortality as exposure to air pollution increases? Be sure to mention specific values when describing the relationship between exposure and risk ratio. Note: Lines on the graphs were created using different common statistical methods/models to better characterize any relationship between air pollution and mortality risk. For this course, we will be focusing on the non-linear association (solid bold line) when interpreting the figure.
   

Figure 1: Bold solid line represents non-linear association estimated using restricted cubic spline (3 knots); dashed line represents 95% CIs for the non-linear, and dotted line represents linear association. .

1. How does air pollution contribute to the development and/or worsening of this disease? Discuss the specific physiological changes associated with your disease and how continued exposure to air pollution can make symptoms worse. Answering this question will require you to do some outside research. Please cite all sources fully, including in-text citations, and a full reference list at the end of your post.

Grading

To see how this assignment will be graded, click on the three dots in the upper right corner of this page, then click “Show Rubric”.  If you’re reviewing this assignment using the Canvas mobile app, the rubric is included in the Grade tab.