We thank T. Yasuma and co-workers for their valuable comments on our paper describing the association between individual-level long-term concentrations of air pollutants at the residential addresses of patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and mortality among them [1]. We agree that the release of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) or particulate matter in cigarette smoke is one of the considerations in interpreting our results. Thus, we stratified all patients into ever- and non-smokers according to their smoking status and analysed the effect of air pollutants on mortality risk in these patients using our health analysis models that included different sets of confounders (figure 1).

我们感谢 T. Yasuma 及其同事对我们的论文提出的宝贵意见，该论文描述了特发性肺纤维化 (IPF) 患者居住地址的个人水平长期空气污染物浓度与其死亡率之间的关系 [1] 。我们同意香烟烟雾中二氧化氮（NO ₂ ）或颗粒物的释放是解释我们的结果的考虑因素之一。因此，我们根据吸烟状况将所有患者分为曾经吸烟者和不吸烟者，并使用包含不同混杂因素的健康分析模型分析了空气污染物对这些患者死亡风险的影响（图 1）。