When it comes to pressing environmental issues, air pollution is a common concern. The effects of air pollution on human health, specifically cardiovascular and respiratory systems, are well known. But have you ever wondered what it might be doing to your brain?
A research team from the Universities of Birmingham and Manchester asked this exact question and discovered that even short-term exposure to air pollution can have surprising and long-lasting effects on our ability to perform daily activities.
Studying the Effects of Pollution
The specific type of pollution at the forefront of this study, published in Nature Communications, is particulate matter (PM) air pollution. PM air pollution is a mixture of solid particulates and liquid droplets in the air and includes things like dust, smoke, and soot.
Study participants were split into two groups and exposed to either PM air pollution or clean air. Researchers simulated PM air pollution by using controlled candle smoke. A number of breathing techniques were also used, including whatever the participants considered to be their normal breathing patterns and breathing only through the mouth or nose.
Participants had their cognitive abilities tested before exposure and then again four hours after exposure. The research team measured specific cognitive abilities like working memory, selective attention, emotion recognition, psychomotor speed, and sustained attention.
Read More: What Is Smog, and What Have We Done to Improve Air Quality?
What Is Pollution Doing to Our Brains?
The results suggest that short-term exposure to PM air pollution drastically affects people’s ability to do things like perform routine tasks and interpret emotions.
Dr. Thomas Faherty, a co-author of the study, noted in a press release that the “study provides compelling evidence that even short-term exposure to particulate matter can have immediate negative effects on brain functions essential for daily activities.”
Of all the cognitive functions measured, two in particular stood out: selective attention and emotion recognition. In the group exposed to PM air pollution, both of these areas showed a decline in function no matter how participants breathed in the contaminated air.
Selective attention plays an important role in decision making and goal-oriented behavior, while emotion recognition allows us to behave in socially-acceptable ways and helps us detect and interpret emotions in ourselves and others.
The study uses the very common task of grocery shopping to help explain how the negative impacts of PM air pollution on cognitive functions can affect our daily lives. For example, impaired selective attention can make it difficult to prioritize items on your shopping list and, instead, leave you more vulnerable to impulse buying.
There are also major impacts on our ability to do our jobs if something like our commute to work or a short walk at lunchtime can cause temporary cognitive decline. Beyond just losing attention span and the capacity to effectively focus on tasks, a decrease in emotion recognition can make it extremely difficult to work with other people and to behave appropriately in meetings and other social spaces.
But it isn’t all bad news. Certain cognitive functions, like working memory, showed no decline after exposure to PM air pollution. This result proves that some brain functions are quite resilient and are able to avoid the inflammation caused by pollution that researchers believe is responsible for the observed negative reactions.
Read More: Combat Cognitive Decline With These 5 Activities
Regulations and Research Are Needed
Overall, this study highlights that further research is needed on the connections between PM air pollution and cognitive functions.
What is clear is that, as pollution continues to get worse in heavily-populated urban areas, stricter air quality regulations and public health measures must be enforced to avoid significant impacts on economic growth and to help keep our brains healthy.
Article Sources
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As the marketing coordinator at Discover Magazine, Stephanie Edwards interacts with readers across Discover's social media channels and writes digital content. Offline, she is a contract lecturer in English & Cultural Studies at Lakehead University, teaching courses on everything from professional communication to Taylor Swift, and received her graduate degrees in the same department from McMaster University. You can find more of her science writing in Lab Manager and her short fiction in anthologies and literary magazine across the horror genre.
