Brownfield land and emergency hospital admissions in England: a small-area ecological study using contamination hazard score as an exposure proxy

Higher LSOA-level contamination hazard scores in England are linked to a non-linear decreasing trend in relative risk of emergency hospital admissions for all-cause, respiratory, and cardiovascular diagnoses.

• Why it matters: Evidence on brownfield land health impacts is limited because exposures and pathways are hard to define, leaving uncertainty about whether potentially contaminated land relates to present-day hospital use.
• What they did: Using population-weighted contamination hazard scores for 32,844 LSOAs, Bayesian hierarchical models estimated associations with age-sex standardised emergency admissions (2010–2019), adjusting for deprivation, density, tobacco expenditure, greenspace, urbanicity, and ethnicity.
• The result: Across 42,875,231 all-cause, 6,657,050 respiratory, and 4,393,461 CVD admissions, stronger inverse associations appeared in urban and least deprived areas, with region-specific patterns such as inverse links in London and parts of the North West and East.

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