A link between air pollution and Alzheimer’s disease | Hacker News Reader

A link between air pollution and Alzheimer’s disease

latimes.com

74 pointsozdave36 comments

Is the cause "air" pollution, or could it be "noise" pollution? I would think living near loud traffic areas might lead to less quality sleep for the brain. And a lack of sleep is linked with alzheimers. Just a thought.

Particles can traverse through the nose / olfactory bulb straight to the brain.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26194036

I wonder if breathing through your mouth would mitigate these effects.

What would be surprising to me is that they found air pollution makes Alzheimers less likely.

If it accelerates it that's unfortunately but I'm not surprised.

I think the default would be has no effect.

Why? I am not being trite. Why should we assume "no effect", or "no correlation", rather than "everything has some effect on everything else" and "everything is correlated with everything else"?

What are examples of places with high levels of these pollutants?

Are suburbs generally ok? Should I limit exercise in urban areas? Would it be bad to live near a highway?

I'm curious if this could be related to lack of exercise or lack of sunlight or perhaps poor diet. All would probably go along with living in a high pollution area?

Edit. They mention they control for a lot of those factors. I wonder how well they can do that?

"surprising" as in "not surprising" - way to go LA Times. You hit another one out of the park with backwards editorializing. Next, another "surprising" link between water pollution and cancer.

It is surprising that particles going into your lungs would have significant cognitive effects.

Although it's fashionable to assert that pollution causes every imaginable ill effect, there needs to be a causal chain. In this case, "air pollutants induced inflammation, cell death and the buildup of amyloid protein in the brain".

That chain is not intuitive (and not predicted), thus, "Surprising."

Err.. what?

Particles going into your lungs to produce cognitive effects is the basis behind smoking cigarettes, marijuana, meth, etc.

Uh, no.

Nicotine, THC, etc. are the active ingredients expected to cause cognitive effects.

The particles are regarded as particularly unwanted--especially by marijuana users.

This is the whole idea behind vaporizers.

latimes won't let you read the article with an adblocker enabled

And if you disable adblock the page becomes almost unreadable.

Here's a site which appears to have basically the same info without the bullshit - https://www.alzinfo.org/articles/air-pollution-raise-dementi...

Here's the paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3622279/

Totally unreadable on my iPhone. Couldn't dismiss the ad to read the article.

Worked fine in w3m. I wish people on this site would stop complaining that their crappy user agents don't work correctly.

I just curl web pages by hand!

You use curl! Luxury! I use telnet.

Personally I use netcat

Kids these days. So lazy. I browse by having an LED hooked up to my Ethernet port and decoding TCP packets in my head.

uBlock origin, chrome, macOS works fine.

Same here, with uMatrix added, too. Rather pleasant experience, too. No autoplaying video (I would see that there was a video and I'd bet it would autoplay had I not had uMatrix).

turning off javascript usually fixes it.

They wish for compensation for their work. Without that compensation, you don't get to see their work. What's wrong with that?

My issue is that even paid subscribers are served an unbearable amount of ads, e.g. videos in-line with the text of the article. I wrote their support to let them know that I'd gladly pay more on a higher tier to avoid ads, and this is their response:

"Ad-blocker must be disabled to allow advertisements and to continue to continue to the webiste. Paying for our content is similar to paying for cable or buying a magazine. You pay for those services but they still have advertising. Advertisements help to keep the cost of digital subscriptions extremely low in relation to other newspapers."

I'm using privoxy, noscript, and request policy to block ads, and can read that article just fine.

Maybe this is a good thing. After Trump's EPA guts clean air regulations, we'll all develop Alzheimer's, and we can forget that he was ever elected.

Thinking he has early onset. From my medical opinion. Would explain how he can contradict himself in the same interview. All those years in NYC taking their toll.

> From my medical opinion. Would explain how he can contradict himself in the same interview.

The obvious and simpler explanation for that isn't Alzheimer's, it's shamelessness.

It's strange, but I've had this exact conversation with my wife earlier in the year.

What was your medical opinion when one of the candidates collapsed on 9/11/16?

Officially? My medical opinion is that she collapsed.

the Trumpmind is always looking for what sounds virtuous and popular. but that varies depending on the audience. and audiences change from hour to hour. so he's constantly contradicting himself based on his most recent audience.

one hour he's talking to some heavyweights from the energy industry. the next it's some heavyweights from the war industry. then it's some heavyweights in the legal profession. then it's an expert in terrorism. and their opinions all differ somewhat. Trumpmind soaks it all in and regurgitates it.

he's an actor -- always eager to please the audience with an outrageous performance.

Sylvester Stallone should cast him in one his righteous ass-kicking mercenary movies. then Trump could go on screen and terminate Arnold. the ratings would be sky high!!!

Trump opponents really do want him and the country to fail just so that they can say "I told you so."

No, we want him to fail because if he succeeds, from our point of view, the country fails.

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