Fig 1.
Study area, residential localization of sarcoidosis patients and location of the sampling stations, numbered as in Table 1.
The inset shows the location of Parma in the Italian peninsula. Data from OpenStreetMap visualisation.
Table 1.
Locations of the studied sites (stations) for enviromental biomonitoring.
Table 2.
Characteristics of sarcoidosis patients and of general population in Parma province.
Fig 2.
Graphic representation of the sarcoidosis prevalence for municipality (MDs) and health districts (HDs).
In the upper right, graphic representation of the sarcoidosis mean prevalence health districts groups compared using ANOVA to Fisher (Significance is expressed with different letters [a, b] and by level of significativity expressed by p values <0.005).
Fig 3.
Histogram representing the mean prevalence of sarcoidosis as function of the altitude, obtained grouping together MDs over intervals of 50 meters of altitude.
The highest and lowest values of prevalence in the municipalities belonging to each interval are indicated by the bars; a square symbol identifies the median value in each group. The values of the aggregate prevalence for each group are indicated by crosses.
Fig 4.
Heat map of distribution of sarcoidosis cases the Parma area.
The color-scale from low blue (equal to 1) to red (equal to 8) displays the number of patients resident within a range of 500 meters from each considered point on the map of the area under study. Data from OpenStreetMap visualisation.
Fig 5.
Histogram of the prevalence in the quarters of the Parma town.
The inset shows the location of quarters in the town.
Table 3.
Concentrations of trace metals in X. parietina tissues from 11 sites in the Parma province and prevalence of sarcoidosis MDs (the prevalence sites labeled with an asterisk refer to Parma MD).
Fig 6.
Heat-Plot representing the correlations among different stations computed from the concentrations of the metals under study and associated dendrogram obtained from the hierarchical clustering analysis of the same data computed using a distance based on Pearson correlation coefficients and complete linkage.
The associations for which the value of correlation is significant (p value < 0.05) are marked with an asterisk.