Risk of non-cancer respiratory diseases attributed to humidifier disinfectant exposure in Koreans: age-period-cohort and differences-in-difference analyses.

Objectives: Humidifier disinfectants (HDs) were sold in Korea from 1994 until their recall in 2011. We examined the incidence patterns of 8 respiratory diseases before and after the HD recall and estimated the attributable risk in the Korean population.

Methods: Using National Health Insurance data from 2002 to 2019, we performed age-cohort-period and difference-in-differences analyses (comparing periods before versus after the recall) to estimate the population-attributable fraction and the excess number of episodes.