By John Salak –
Climate change and pollution may be doing an unhealthy number on both the young and the old, possibly fostering mental stress, dementia and even death. Two separate recent studies underscored the negative impact that environmental issues are having on these two demographics.
Research out of Drexel University reports that human-induced climate change may, in fact, be causing mental distress among high schoolers in the United States. The team’s findings were based on a representative survey of more than 38,00 high school students from 22 public school districts in 14 U.S. states.
The quarter of these adolescents who had experienced the highest number of climate disaster days within the past two years and the past five years—think hurricanes, floods, tornados, droughts and wildfires—bore the brunt of the problem. They had a 20 percent higher chance of developing mental distress than peers who had little or no experience with disasters.
“We know that climate change has and will have catastrophic impacts across the globe,” said lead author Amy Auchincloss, an associate professor. “But we were alarmed to find that climate-related disasters already were affecting so many teens in the U.S. For example, within the past 2 years, many school districts in our study were subject to climate disasters for over 20 days.”
“We found the strongest effects on mental distress in the 2 years immediately following a climate disaster—with the effect gradually weakening 5 to 10 years after the disaster,” added co-author Josiah Kephart, an assistant professor.
Mature adults also appeared to be under health assault from adverse climate conditions, in this case, air pollution caused by traffic.
An Emory University study published in Neurology, a professional journal, found that people exposed to higher levels of traffic-related air pollution were more likely to have high amounts of amyloid plaques in their brains that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease after death.
The university’s research team stressed that its findings did not absolutely prove that air pollution causes more amyloid plaques in the brain. However, the work did identify a potentially serious association.
Emery’s results were based on the examination of brain tissue from 224 people who agreed to donate their brains at death to advance dementia research. The average of age the participants when they died was 76. The researchers specifically looked at the traffic-related air pollution exposure based on the home addresses of the people involved at the time of death.
“These results add to the evidence that fine particulate matter from traffic-related air pollution affects the amount of amyloid plaque in the brain,” reported study author Anke Huels.
Traffic-related PM2.5 concentrations are a major source of ambient pollution in urban areas like the metro Atlanta area where most of the donors lived. The researcher found that the average level of exposure in the year before death was 1.32 micrograms per cubic meter and 1.35 micrograms in the three years before death.
Ultimately, people with higher exposures to air pollution one and three years before death were more likely to have higher levels of amyloid plaques in their brains, which is associated with Alzheimer’s. More specifically, those with more than one microgram of pollution exposure were twice as likely to have higher levels of plaques than others, while those exposed to the same level in the three years before death were 87 percent more likely to have higher levels of plaques.
The university’s researchers also looked at whether having the main gene variant associated with Alzheimer’s disease, APOE e4, had any effect on the relationship between air pollution and signs of Alzheimer’s in the brain. Their results showed the strongest relationship between air pollution and signs of Alzheimer’s was among those without the gene variant.
“This suggests that environmental factors such as air pollution could be a contributing factor to Alzheimer’s in patients in which the disease cannot be explained by genetics,” Huels explained.
More research is needed to examine the relationship between traffic pollution and increased risk of dementia. But both the Emory and Drexel studies warn of potentially new and frightening consequences tied to deteriorating environmental issues.
