Air pollution is an environmental and health issue throughout the world. As the Physicians for Social Responsibility wrote, "Air pollution can trigger strokes. They can also affect brain development and reduce human intelligence." According to the World Health Organization, 7 million people died in 2012 from long-term air pollution exposure. Strong links between cardiovascular issues- strokes, heart disease, and cancer, are connected to air pollution's development both outside and inside of people’s metropolitan homes. Never before have scientists found that the damage from air pollution can cause damage to our brains, but now a new study from the Boston University School of Medicine and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical center have found that air pollution can shrink and destroy brain structures over a lifetime.
A recent study from Boston University School of Medicine and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center reports that brain structures and cognitive functions can become impaired in middle-aged and older adults from moderate levels of air pollution. In the May 2015 issue of Stroke Magazine, 900 participants of the Framingham Heart Story were studied and included evidence of smaller brain structures (covert brain infarcts) that showed early signs of blockage the blood vessels. All of these participants lived near busy roadways, power plants, factories, and/or burning wood productions. The study evaluated that trucks and heavy machinery may be the cause of the community’s increase of heart attacks and strokes.
The brain’s inflammation process is now being researched in connection with the air pollution that exists in metropolitan areas and the process through which tiny particles in the lungs form and effect brain function. Elissa Wilker, a researcher at the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, says, "This is one of the first studies to look at the relationship between ambient air pollution and brain structure. Our findings suggest that air pollution is associated with insidious effects on structural brain aging, even in dementia- and stroke-free individuals." The study was lead by looking at the entire cerebral brain volume of participants over the age of 60. The hippocampal volume reflects any change in the brain due to memory, pathology, and aging. The study found that the participants who lived in urban regions of New England and New York had smaller than the average cerebral brain volume and covert brain infarcts. The brain was aging one year faster than the person's real age. Inhaling the pigments of pollution can cause inflammation in the lungs and brain leading to "silent" strokes.
How does brain aging connect to air pollution exactly? Wilker commented, "The mechanisms through which air pollution may affect brain aging remain unclear, but systemic inflammation resulting from the deposit of fine particles in the lungs is likely important."
What's even worse is that air pollution is unequally distributed throughout cities. Women, children, and the elderly are the common groups to suffer from air pollution. Dr. Flavia Bustreao, World Health Organization's Assistant Director said, "Poor women and children pay a heavy price from indoor air pollution since they spend more time at home breathing in smoke and soot from leaky coal and wood cook stoves." If women or children are living near coal-fired power plants or industrial boilers, the airborne mercury can harm the brain and central nervous system. Exposure to methylmercuy can affect a developing fetus's of baby's brain and nervous system. The consequences can range from cognitive thinking, memory, attention, language, and motor and visual skills.
This Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine research has exploded all over media. This study is another linkage between the affects of pollution on life expectancy, stroke, and cognitive delays in the development of children.
It’s going to take local as well as global initiatives before we can find cleaner air in metropolitan communities. Simon Upton, an environment director at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, finds that pollution from sewage and waste water will continue to expel chemicals into the air unless more governmental and tax laws are planned for the future. Upton predicts, “Air pollution will become a bigger global killer than dirty water."
These long-term environmental problems are associated to climate change, land distribution and use, water treatment, and sewage cleaning, and more. Therefore these issues needed to be solved together before a reduction in air pollution would arise. As Upton reported to The Guardian News, "The key is that these four biggest problems are interconnected- biodiversity is affected by climate change and land use, water is linked to health problems, for instance. You can't solve any one of these in isolation. So to be effective, governments have to focus on all of these four and look very closely at the connections between them."
