{"id":13742,"date":"2019-10-15T09:05:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-15T02:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/air-pollution-may-damage-peoples-brains\/"},"modified":"2024-01-25T09:10:28","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T02:10:28","slug":"air-pollution-may-damage-peoples-brains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/en\/air-pollution-may-damage-peoples-brains\/","title":{"rendered":"Air Pollution May Damage People\u2019s Brains"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

The University of Montana neuropathologist, Lilian Calder\u00f3n-Garcidue\u00f1as, had been studying the brains as part of her research on environmental effects on neural development, and this particular set of samples came from autopsy examinations carried out on people who had died suddenly in Mexico City, where she used to work as a researcher and physician. When Lilian Calder\u00f3n-Garcidue\u00f1as discovered abundant hallmarks of Alzheimer\u2019s disease in a batch of human brain samples a few years ago, she initially wasn\u2019t sure what to make of it. Although Calder\u00f3n-Garcidue\u00f1as had collected much of the tissue herself while attending the autopsies in Mexico, the light-microscope slides she was analyzing had been prepared by her colleagues, so she was in the dark about what patient each sample came from. By the end of the project, she\u2019d identified accumulations of the Alzheimer\u2019s disease\u2013associated proteins amyloid-\u00df and hyperphosphorylated tau in almost all of the 203 brains she studied.\u00a0 The people whose brains she\u2019d been studying were not only adults, but teens and even children. For the last three decades, she\u2019d been studying the health effects of Mexico City\u2019s notoriously polluted air\u2014a blight that earned the capital the dubious distinction of most polluted megacity on the planet from the United Nations in 1992. During that time, she\u2019s discovered many links between exposure to air pollution and signs of neural damage in animals and humans. Although her findings are observational, and the pathology of proteins such as amyloid-\u00df is not fully understood, Calder\u00f3n-Garcidue\u00f1as argues that air pollution is the most likely culprit behind the development of the abnormalities she saw in her postmortem samples\u2014plus many other detrimental changes to the brains of Mexico City\u2019s residents.<\/p>\n

Once controversial, the theory that air pollution damages the brain is gaining traction in the research community. Although government officials in Mexico have worked to improve air quality since the 1990s, the last couple of years have seen thick smog descend over buildings, forcing periodic school and office closures to stop people from venturing into the toxic air. And it\u2019s not just Mexico. As the rest of the world\u2019s urban areas and their associated congestion continue to expand, most countries are witnessing increases in airborne contaminants, from noxious gases such as nitrogen oxides and ozone to fine particulate matter such as dust, soot, and nanospheres of metals that penetrate deep into the human body. One 2018 report by the Boston-based nonprofit Health Effects Institute warned that up to 95 percent of the people on Earth were breathing unsafe air. These trends are matched by an increasing incidence of respiratory and cardiovascular problems\u2014consequences of the inflammation and tissue damage provoked by multiple components of air pollution. At the World Health Organization\u2019s inaugural conference on air pollution last fall, health officials gathered to discuss data showing that dirty air is implicated in more than 7 million deaths per year. Only in the last few years, however, have researchers begun raising the alarm about links between humans\u2019 exposure to air pollution and brain function.<\/p>\n

Epidemiologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists are now working to fill in the gaps in knowledge of how air pollution might contribute to these less visible effects on human health, both by documenting the cognitive changes occurring in human populations exposed to air pollution, and by looking inside human and animal brains to try to decipher the underlying mechanisms. \u201cThis is the beginnings of a whole new field,\u201d says Caleb Finch, a gerontologist at the University of Southern California (USC). \u201cThis is like tobacco research and cancer 70 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Smog over Mexico City<\/em><\/p>\n

Original published by\u00a0Scientist Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The University of Montana neuropathologist, Lilian Calder\u00f3n-Garcidue\u00f1as, had been studying the brains as part of her research on environmental effects on neural development, and this particular set of samples came from autopsy examinations carried out on people who had died suddenly in Mexico City, where she used to work as a researcher and physician.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10821,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-and-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huib.hueuni.edu.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}