City polluted air can really hurt your brain – researchers from Harvard have announced on Thursday.
We all know that polluted air is bad for you, and we always knew that it hurts our body in a way, but we always thought that our lungs were at stake here, not our brains.
A study in the Stroke journal has found that senior citizens that are exposed, or inhale on a day to day basis small particles that are emitted in form of car exhausts, have a higher risk of mini-strokes, and brain scans have shown smaller brain volumes – when comparing to less polluted areas.
The World Health Organization, for short WHO, has declared air pollution to be the leading cause of cancer. Now findings suggest that just by inhaling dirty city air, our brain ages a full year. ” It suggests that subtle but potentially harmful effects are going on: The effect on the brain of being one year older is similar to the effect of pollution.” study’s lead author, Elissa Wilker has stated. Elissa is an instructor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and a researcher at the Cardiovascular Epidemiological Research Unit at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Wilker and her colleagues have crunched data from 1995 to 2005 regarding MRI scans for senior citizens age 60 years and older. Their discovery was baffling, to say the least. Comparing from the pool of 943 adults, that shown no symptoms of dementia, or strokes who also lived in the most polluted areas, with those who lived in the most clean zones, researchers have found that those exposed to dirty city air have a 46 percent higher risk of mini-strokes and a 0.32 percent reduction in brain volume. – The scans were done as part of the Framingham Offspring Study.
But nobody knows how pollution affects our brain. “That’s the million dollar question,” Wilker said. “We think when you breathe those particles in they can cause inflammation.” But researchers are not sure. It is a mystery whether inflammation that starts in the lungs spreads to the brain, or the brain somehow sucks in all the toxic particles.
Dr. Lawrence Wechsler, an expert that hasn’t collaborated on Wilker’s study, and who is also the chairman of the department of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh, has stated that the new research ” is a little worrisome for those of us living in cities.”. And that ” this is the most solid evidence we’ve had to date that there might really be some association between the low levels of pollution people are exposed to and some kind of long-term brain injury.”
Polluted air can be our downfall, and we have just been starting to discover how much it affects our body. But more so, polluted air is the arch enemy of senior citizens. With a 46 higher risk of having mini-strokes, we need a solution as soon as possible.
Dr. Beate Ritz, another scientist that is not affiliated to Wilker’s research, who is also a chair of the department of epidemiology at the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health has stated that ” Mini-strokes don’t cause as much damage as a larger stroke, but sometimes they can do nasty things depending on where they are [in the brain]. They won’t leave you totally disabled but they can make your health-related quality of life much lower.”.
And the nasty thing about mini-strokes, Ritz says, is that you don’t even know when you’re having one ” You might be a little more dizzy today and then lose a little more vision tomorrow. And people tend to attribute that to ageing instead of knowing what happened.”
