Dr. Siddhartha Mandal won The LMIC Best Abstract Award for “Long-term exposure to PM2.5 associated with decline in kidney function in a large urban cohort in two Indian cities” at the 35th Annual Conference of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE). The ISEE 2023 Conference was held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan from September 17-21, 2023.
The award-winning paper finds that the evidence linking time-varying PM2.5 with kidney function in the South Asian population exposed to high levels of PM2.5 is limited due to few longitudinal studies and lack of robust exposure data. In this study, the authors show that long-term exposure to PM2.5 was associated with decline in eGFR levels in both Chennai and Delhi. Given the high burden of air pollution and chronic diseases in India, there may be high potential long-term benefits of reducing air pollution on renal health in urban India. Other Authors in this paper include Ram Jagannathan, Shuchi Anand, Mohammed K Ali, KM Venkat Narayan, Viswanathan Mohan, Nikhil Tandon, Poornima Prabhakaran, Petter Ljungman, Joel Schwartz, D Prabhakaran.
Dr. Mandal has won this award for a second consecutive year. In ISEE 2022, his abstract titled “Assessing daily PM2.5 at every square kilometer of India over 2008-2020 using a machine learning framework” was adjudged as the Best LMIC Abstract from the Asia & Western Pacific Chapter. The LMIC Best Abstract Award was created in 2021 to recognize high-quality abstracts in challenging areas of research by authors in low and medium-income countries.
