Table 1.
Demographics of study participants for selected samples.
Fig 1.
Exposure schedule for volunteers.Each exposure arm is composed of three days.
Day 1 is one of the four exposures (clean air, DE, O3, or DE+O3), Day 2 is always O3, and Day 3 has no exposure.
Table 2.
Descriptive statistics by exposure.*
Fig 2.
Heatmap of the plasma cytokine levels for all exposure treatments over a 24-hour period. The concentrations in Fig 2 increase as the color changes from blue to red.
Fig 3.
Post/Pre exposure cytokine concentration ratios for the four treatments.
Each blue “dot” represents an individual Post/Pre cytokine concentration ratio for that respective treatment. A solid line in each of the cytokine scatterplots displays the median post/pre ratio. The dotted line that is anchored at “1” on each y-axis indicates the ratio where the Pre-exposure concentration is equal to the Post-exposure concentration. A statistically significant result above/below “1” indicates that there has been an increase/decrease in the concentration for that respective cytokine at end of the 2-hour exposure period.
Fig 4.
Follow-up/Pre exposure cytokine concentration ratios for the four treatments.
Each blue “dot” represents an individual Follow-up/Pre cytokine concentration ratio for that respective treatment. A solid line in each of the cytokine scatterplots displays the median follow-up/pre ratio. The dotted line that is anchored at “1” on each y-axis indicates the ratio where the Pre-exposure concentration is equal to the Follow-up concentration. A statistically significant result above “1” indicates that there has been an increase in the concentration for that respective cytokine 22-hours after the end of the 2-hour exposure period. A statistically significant result below “1” indicates that there has been a decrease in the concentration for that respective cytokine 22-hours after the end of the 2-hour exposure period.
Table 3.
Cell count descriptive statistics by exposure and sample time.a
Fig 5.
TNF-α cytokine results for three exposure scenarios.
The boxes in Fig 5, above, display the median, upper 75%, and lower 25% of the concentrations for TNF-α, while the bars display the upper 97.5% and the lower 2.5% of the concentrations. This figure shows that the combination of the DE-only and O3-only exposures into a DE+O3 co-exposure creates a suppression of TNF-α that does not recover after a 22-hour period.
Table 4.
Pre, post, and follow-up statistical comparisons by exposure.a
Fig 6.
Spearman correlations for pre, post and 22-hour post DE+O3 co-exposure responses.A white dot in a cell indicates a statistically significant (p<0.05) positive or negative correlation.
Lymph = lymphocytes, Mono = monocytes, PMN = polymorphonuclear neutrophil.