Whereas rhinitis has an important public health impact, in adults there is no standardized definition of rhinitis in epidemiological studies. Furthermore, environmental factors of rhinitis are barely known, and in particular, there are very few studies on the effects of long-term exposure to air pollution on rhinitis in adults. To fill these gaps, we used data from two European multicentre epidemiological studies with extensive data on respiratory health and individual estimated exposures to long-term air pollution. Our findings showed that to better characterize rhinitis, one need to consider together all the characteristics of the nasal symptoms, the comorbidities and the allergic sensitization, and not to restrict the disease to one question or one allergic sensitization test. We found no association between long-term air pollution and incidence of rhinitis, but we showed that long-term exposure to air pollution is associated to an increased severity of rhinitis, emphasising that air pollution needs to be controlled.
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