Researchers say the high emissions of air pollution from diesel cars resulted in more than 4,500 premature deaths a year in Europe.
The study comes two years after the disclosure of the "cheat" Volkswagen in the emission tests in the United States.
Very small particles emitted by pollution pose a threat to human health and cause 425,000 premature deaths each year due to air pollution in the EU, of which 4,560 are diesel deaths.
The risk is increasing in areas of concentration of diesel-powered vehicles, such as northern Italy, according to researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.