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Long-term exposure to outdoor air pollution linked to increased risk of dementia
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hodgehog11 1y agoGiven that recent Nature paper which claims that a lithium depletion could be responsible for Alzheimer's disease, is there any mechanism that could link increased air pollution to a reduction in lithium levels?
- cluckindan 1y agoExposure to another similar metal could in theory displace lithium in biological processes.
- AnthonBerg 1y agoThe two have been posited: Lithium can be viewed an antioxidant – correctly or not?, I do not know. Air pollution can be viewed as oxidative stress. It’s interesting to search Google Scholar for “lithium antioxidant”.
- cyberax 1y agoLithium by itself is not an antioxidant. It's already oxidized in any bio-available compound, so it can't be used to reduce anything. But it apparently somehow modulates other systems that help with oxidative stress.
- AnthonBerg 1y agoThanks!
- ethan_smith 1y agoSome research suggests air pollution may disrupt blood-brain barrier integrity, potentially affecting mineral transport including lithium, while particulate matter can also bind to metal ions in the bloodstream altering their bioavailability.
- KolibriFly 1y agoRight now, most of the pollution–dementia work points more toward inflammation, oxidative stress, and vascular impacts rather than nutrient depletion
- pacifika 1y agoProves ULEZ is the right call.
- 0x1ceb00da 1y agoCurrent AQI in london ULEZ is 48 according to google maps which is not that good. Does that mean AQI is not a very good measure of air quality?
- cinntaile 1y agoIt doesn't really make sense what you're saying. First you say it's not good but then you question the index. You're clearly using the AQI to base your opinion on? To answer the ULEZ question you should compare to not having ULEZ there, which is what the GP was talking about.
- 0x1ceb00da 1y agoRight so london aqi used to be much worse but ULEZ helped.
- CJefferson 1y agoI don't know the current average, but it used to often be much higher than that. Maybe the average has improved?
- daemonologist 1y ago48 is decent - at the high end of the "good" range - but AQI fluctuates a lot from day to day. There were some fires on the other side of the continent from me and that was enough to bump the AQI here above 80. Here's a report with some longer term trends (warning: 2MB PDF download): https://www.london.gov.uk/media/105046/download https://www.london.gov.uk/media/105046/download . Air pollution is down across London, and sharply so on the most proximate roadside sensors.
- echelon_musk 1y agoI wish all diesels could be included in the ULEZ ban. Or at minimum all non commercial diesel engines. As a motorbike rider I can taste the diesel fumes as soon as I'm behind one in a way that's unlike any petrol car. There's large particulates being thrown out by even the most luxurious diesel cars that you simply couldn't tell if you're behind in a car.
- lemonberry 1y agoAs the sole caregiver for a father with dementia I can tell you it's a nightmare. If you have children please, please plan for late life care. And if you're going to be caring for either of your parents start planning and build a support network. By the time I knew I needed help I was drowning. Learn how to ask for help. I thought I was a relatively progressive 50 year old man, but it turns out help is a 4-letter word.
- d4mi3n 1y agoYou have my condolences. I helped my wife care for her late father with Lewy body dementia. I think many people recognize they may need to care for the people that raised them at some point, but the realities of the costs--both financially and emotionally--are rarely discussed. @lemonberry feel free to reach out if you need a friendly ear, my email is in my profile. On a personal note to anyone in this situation: Do not go it alone. Being a caregiver is hard, but being a caregiver for someone with serious memory issues is brutal and requires 24/7 monitoring. Your loved one will not always cooperate. They may change into someone who does not resemble the person you knew. Many states require such persons to be homed somewhere with a 24/7 nursing staff. Plan accordingly.
- saltcured 1y agoMy sympathies. As hard as it is, supporting family members also need to learn to prioritize taking care of themselves and avoiding a spiral towards burnout. With dementia, there is often a time when the patient needs a more controlled environment with 24x7 supervision. Dementia sleep schedules and behaviors fall apart and are not really compatible with a family caregiver's own health needs. Depending on the dementia case, risky behaviors may emerge at night, and having observant caregivers awake 24x7 may be very important. The financial picture for this is quite difficult in the US. Normally this requires a care facility at some point, as it is impossibly expensive to bring sufficient dementia care via visiting professionals. To safely handle dementia with "sundowning" and wandering behaviors, you usually need a facility that has about a dozen residents or more. Then, budgets allow for multiple onsite staff and overnight wakeful staff. This can bring more distinct staff roles too, e.g. cooking and housekeeping versus care. Even this may be overwhelmingly costly, to the point where the dementia ends up depleting the estate and then shifting to some kind of government support. For family or trustees managing this process, it is full of difficult decisions regarding budget and care tradeoffs. For example, do you splurge on "nicer" facilities or other caregiver factors early on, or try to reserve more funds for the inevitable crises? Dementia can be a drawn-out process, where care needs expand to a crescendo before collapsing back to hospice care, which may be more like other terminal illnesses.
- knowitnone2 1y agowell, long-term exposure to outdoor air pollution already shortens their lifespan so they won't even live long enough to reach the average age for dementia
- sillyfluke 1y agoWell, the Yuramal in Colombia are the people that hold the record for the most Alzeihmer cases because many possess the gene for early onset and exhibit the diseases at 40 year of age. So for them the age is quite young. This goes to show that currently the record is held by genetic factors and not environmental factors. But they also show that it instead of eliminating the root cause of the disease, the solution might be eliminating its symptoms instead. Cause one woman who had the gene defied all odds and exhibited the symptom of the disease in her 70s. The reasoning is that another gene she had, the Christchurch gene, protected her brain from the disease. So if someone can use that info to prevent symptoms of the disease eliminating the root cause would become secondary.
- jt2190 1y ago> ... defied all odds and exhibited the symptom of the disease in her 70s. I assume you mean: "exhibited no symptoms of the disease until her 70s". Other than luck, did they have any idea why she was able to resist the disease for so long?
- sillyfluke 1y agoyes, thats what I meant. Supposedly the woman had another mutation in the Christchurch gene that counteracted the effects of the early onset mutation.
- boothby 1y agoThat's an egregious abuse of statistics. It seems entirely implausible that the age of dementia onset would not move in parallel with lifespan.
- Drunk_Engineer 1y agoLiterally car-brained.
- CalRobert 1y agoNice to know I've got bits of tire in my brain.
- cluckindan 1y agoAnd a credit card.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoCoal trains: https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/coal-pollution-is-killing-people-even-when-were-not-burning-it/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/coal-pollution-is-ki... | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935124006911 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2024.118787 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2024.118787 Warehouses: Air pollution impacts from warehousing in the United States uncovered with satellite data - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50000-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50000-0 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-50000-0 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-50000-0 Where Warehouses Are Built, Air Pollution Follows - https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/153471/where-warehouses-are-built-air-pollution-follows https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/153471/where-wareho... Impact of Warehouse Expansion on Ambient PM2.5 and Elemental Carbon Levels in Southern California's Disadvantaged Communities: A Two-Decade Analysis - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GH001091 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GH00... | https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GH001091 https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GH001091 Global air quality map: https://explore.openaq.org/ https://explore.openaq.org/ (this is why it is so important to electrify trucks and to disallow industrial and commercial parks with lots of truck traffic near residential and school areas; all of this combustion/fossil energy pollution is creating health debt that will catch up with us)
- doctorwho42 1y ago
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- bethekidyouwant 1y agoFor a brief fleeting moment, man was not plagued by indoor air pollution nor outdoor air pollution
- smokel 1y agoThat was before the invention of fire? I think we had even worse problems back then.
- OJFord 1y agoI think they mean with mains gas able to replace wood and coal fires, but before significant use of internal combustion engine vehicles.
- roywiggins 1y agoLighting before/during gaslight was in some ways worse than that, people routinely lit their homes and workplaces with nasty lamp fuels. You could either burn turpentine (which was smokey) or turpentine and alcohol (which wasn't, but was volatile and prone to exploding and setting people on fire). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camphine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camphine Better options existed but weren't as affordable.
- kibwen 1y agoGas for heating is one thing, but gas for cooking absolutely annihilates your indoor air quality. Get an induction stove.
- cjtrowbridge 1y agoThis is an obvious third-factor for poverty and marginalization. Air pollution exposure is the most classic example of unequal protection from harm in environmental justice. Alameda county did a study on this that found as an isolated, direct-result of unequal exposure to air pollution, black people live 15 years less than white people on average in Alameda County alone.
- olalonde 1y agoI find this very hard to believe... Mind sharing that study?
- vallierx 1y agoFrom a quick google search I'm guessing this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11097628/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11097628/
- Tade0 1y agoSame. I hail from a particularly polluted (compared to the rest of the EU) country, so PM2.5 over 80µg/m3 during the entire heating season, NOx constantly above 50µg/m3 in cities due to old diesels with anti-pollution devices turned off or removed entirely and the overall effect is said to be a 3-6 years shorter life expectancy. It checks out compared to countries without these issues, so 15 years to me sounds exaggerated, especially if we're talking about areas close to each other. Such a huge shortening normally involves heavy metal pollution of the drinking water and soil.
- dash2 1y agoYeah, I mean, how do they identify the causal effect here? It's obviously not easy, because polluted areas are also poor areas, and poor people live in poor areas (and have other problems). It would be nice if the article had mentioned this issue. A metastudy of lots of bad correlational studies is just garbage in garbage out. So, did they address the issue? There are ways round it, by the way. As a recent review said: "it is unclear why federal ISAs that are the input into all regulatory analyses tend not to incorporate the emerging body of evidence on the effects of air pollution on health outcomes from the economics literature despite the additional rigor imposed by the emphasis on causal inference." https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/resource/15/1/annurev-resource-101722-081026.pdf https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/resource/15...
- jaian 1y ago[flagged]
- twixfel 1y agoYes, as everyone knows, air pollution is harmless.
- thinkcontext 1y agoWould you prefer that your children breathe lead in their air?
- unsupp0rted 1y ago> Dementias such as Alzheimer's disease are estimated to affect more than 57.4 million people worldwide, a number that is expected to almost triple to 152.8 million cases by 2050 Meaningless number. Make it % or incidence rate per 1000 or something. 57 million people? That’s not so many compared to the billion in China or India. Or is it? Compare it to cancers or car accidents.
- craftkiller 1y ago> Make it % or incidence rate per 1000 or something. Just type it into a calculator. The computer will do all the work. Current world population is ~8 billion so 57_000_000 / 8_000_000_000 = 0.007125 So 0.7% or 7 per 1000 people.
- echelon 1y agoDementia is a disease that mostly effects elderly patients, so make the denominator the number of people in the 65-100 age group. Roughly 10% of the world population, or 800 million, fall within this age group. 57_000_000 / 800_000_000 ~= 7% That's quite a large number of people who will be impacted. > a number that is expected to almost triple to 152.8 million cases by 2050 I don't have the statistics for the elderly population in 2050, but if we assume the proportion is the same (it won't be), then the higher incidence case rate is sobering. It's nearly 20%.
- sgustard 1y agoThe increase is almost entirely due to aging population. "The Lancet study indicates that although the total number of dementia cases is expected to increase substantially, the percentage of the global population affected, once age-adjusted, remains nearly constant, with just a 0.1% change globally between 2019 and 2050"
- ahaucnx 1y agoWhat’s important to understand is that PM2.5 is not PM2.5. It only defines the diameter of the particles but can be composed of very different elements. From salt that dissolves in the lungs to toxic metals. Currently it is extremely difficult to get a comprehensive understanding of the health impacts of these particles. Much more research needs to be done to understand which particle compositions and thus what sources of air pollution (eg traffic, wildfires, factories, landfills, ports etc) have what kind of health effects. If you are interested to see an image how different PM2.5 particle look like, have a look at the photo in this blog post that one of our in-house scientists wrote [1]. [1] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/pm25-is-not-pm25/ https://www.airgradient.com/blog/pm25-is-not-pm25/ (Edited and replaced weight with diameter)
- dragonwriter 1y ago> It only defines the weight of the particles Diameter, not weight. PM2.5 is particles of diameter 2.5μm or less.
- ahaucnx 1y agoYes of course! Thanks for pointing it out. I corrected the above.
- washadjeffmad 1y agoYou're both right enough. Aerodynamic diameter doesn't measure the particles themselves, but how their settling velocity compares to a spherical reference ideal of a certain density (1g/cm*3) in a medium. I don't deal with gas cleaning, but at those scales, if you work a lot with applied processes like filtration and separation, you can ballpark things like daltons with mass and size. I know I do with MWCOs.
- echelon 1y agoIf I had to place bets, it would be reactive species. PAHs, alcohols, and other volatiles.
- 1y ago
- alfor 1y agoGet a cheap air filter at Ikea, or in a pinch a box fan with a HVAC filter taped to it.
- 8s2ngy 1y agoWhat can I do to minimize the effects of air pollution if I have to live in a city with high pollution levels? It seems completely out of my control.
- ahaucnx 1y agoYou can use an air purifier. The Hepa filters are effective in eliminating PM. Gases like NO2 and VOCs can be reduced with carbon filters. Make sure that your carbon filter is large and different get saturated too quickly.
- 5pl1n73r 1y agoDon't go outside. Move only in cars. To be honest, going outside sucks in most cities.
- nerevarthelame 1y agoThe air in a car comes from the outside.
- aziaziazi 1y agoIn Paris a study showed +3 years of life expectancy for cyclists and +2 for public transport users, compared to car commuters. They correlated it with (not a surprise) the benefits of exercice. Sure the pollution effect is worse outside of your car but the gains of daily light exercise offsets the drawbacks of air pollution.
- 01100011 1y agoRecently started looking at daycares in San Diego. All the good ones near me are within a couple hundred feet of a major freeway. I can't believe people send their kids to something like that. Intuitively, I don't mind the ones 0.5 mi away from the freeway, especially if the prevailing winds place them up-wind. I have no idea if that's correct, but it seems to me that you'd have a fairly fast drop-off in noxious substances as you move away from the freeway. We also have this recent trend of building huge apartment complexes right next to the freeways while many of the nicer areas are given to commercial and industrial uses. Makes no sense to me.
- bravesoul2 1y agoHow does a freeway compare to a lower speed but busy road?
- hombre_fatal 1y agoThat’s a good question when it comes to pollution but man, the constant whine of wheels on a freeway drives me insane.
- 01100011 1y agoFor me it's the semi-trucks, modified passenger cars/trucks and motorcycles. Normal cars sound more like white noise. I used to live 2 miles from the freeway and could pick out the problem vehicles when there was an inversion layer to reflect the sound back to the ground.
- GreenWatermelon 1y agoAnd horns. I fuckin hate horns. I swear car horn noises reach into the far ends if the universe, you can't escape them.
- scubadude 1y agoThere's a study from Stanford showing the dropoff based on road traffic volume. The house I tested is 40 metres from a 30,000 cars/day road (2 lanes in each direction). The study suggests that the pm2.5 drops to the equivalent of the ambient air quality of the surrounding area at 37m away. An air quality sensor showed great AQI and no changes during rush hours.
- monster_truck 1y agoIt's only been what, 20 years since we've been able to remove the lead from avgas and haven't?
- nickff 1y agoThis was the case until recently, but I believe the FAA (and some but not all other regulators) has now approved a one-to-one unleaded option (which was created some time ago, and took a long time to approve,) and it is being adopted.
- zzo38computer 1y agoWhat I have been told (by a airplane pilot) is that it takes a long time to distribute the unleaded fuel to the airports.
- swayvil 1y agoThis would suggest that a city is a hive of insanity. The bigger the crazier.
- alliao 1y agocrbox just build boat loads of them? everywhere you're going to spend more than reasonable amount of time is worth it. filters aren't expensive, it's either they suck it or our lung suck it the rest are just talk
- joshuamoyers 1y agoMeanwhile, current administration gutting the clean air act: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/29/nx-s1-5463771/epa-greenhouse-gas-regulations-cars-pollution https://www.npr.org/2025/07/29/nx-s1-5463771/epa-greenhouse-...
- KolibriFly 1y agoWhat's frustrating is that we already have decades of knowledge on how to cut NO2 and soot from transport and energy, but politics moves at a glacial pace while the damage accumulates
- lerp-io 1y agoalzheimer's, parkinson's, dementia, diabetes...all metabolic diseases caused by insulin
- _heimdall 1y agoI was expecting lead to be called out. I didn't go deeper than the article, but assuming the studies mentioned had a higher average age since they were studying dementia, many of them likely grew up around cars burning leaded gasoline.
- DANmode 1y agoChangeTheAirFoundation.org claims 50% of US residences have problems causing this, and worse. Nobody thinks about the quality of their air until it's been hurting them. I was one of many.