It’s not just oxygen that gets sucked into your body every time you breathe. Particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and ozone all damage the heart and lungs, and most of the contaminants penetrate the body. Recent research suggests that contaminants may cause damage beyond the heart and respiratory system. Severe air pollution may adversely affect the human brain and may contribute to increased risk of depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
A paper published in the journal PLOS Biology focused on the American and Danish groups. The researchers found that even in both groups, severe air pollution increased the rate of bipolar disorder by 29%. However, rates of depression and schizophrenia vary from country to country and are attributed to different datasets.
In Denmark, there was a gruesome correlation between atmospheric conditions and mental health, but not as intense as US data. In the personality disorder with the strongest correlation, the prevalence of residents in areas with severe air pollution was 162% higher than those in areas with clean air. Schizophrenia was 148% higher than residents in clean air. Although the rate of increase in depression was the lowest, it was still as high as 50%.
The research team’s lead author, Andrey Rzhetsky, professor of medical genetics at the University of Chicago, says that the most important point is environmental issues, and that it is related to mental illness.
Of course, further analysis is needed, but how will the brain be exposed to contaminants? The researchers say they don’t know whether they will be inhaled directly to reach the brain directly from the nose or indirectly exposed when contaminants enter the lungs, but they don’t know which one can cause systemic inflammation. Contaminants penetrate the brain through several pathways, and once they enter the brain, they cause abnormal effects such as inflammation.
The U.S. dataset consists of more than 150 million medical bills from 2003 to 2013. This includes not only fragmentary information on personal health status, but also personal health data linked to the EPA’s national environmental data at the same time. The Danish dataset contains exposures to air pollution from health data of more than 1.4 million individuals born between 1979 and 2003. However, this data only recorded exposure until age 10. In other words, exposure to contaminants in childhood has a psychiatric effect in adulthood.
As global warming progresses, air pollution will worsen. People of color or low-income households living near sources of pollution are already facing deteriorating access to health care and excessive health problems. The research team hopes to focus more attention on the environmental factors of mental illness through the research results. Related information can be found here .