Air Pollution Seems to Cause Dementia
wired.com
wired.com
I live in a heavily polluted city -- a couple of chemical plants, a coal power station, and the central heating system burning a few (dozen) tons of coal every day to combat -40°C winters. A lot of my friends/acquaintances (in fact, most of them) have moved to other cities and many of them report having trouble adjusting to less polluted atmosphere: trouble sleeping (after moving within the same timezone), constant headaches, rashes, the list goes on.
Also, you hear a lot of stories of older people (third world definition of "older", i.e. around 60), never having a single complaint about their health, moving to cleaner cities and dying in a couple of weeks of strokes and cardiac arrest.
It sounds like old wive's tale, but not when you hear it for the twentieth time from the relatives of yet another person affected.
Are you in your thirties?
I have come to suspect systemic inflation from the rampant pollution in LA caused my new autoimmune disease, or at worst exacerbated a condition I never experienced symptoms of before.
My mother was just diagnosed with dementia, and her mother had it before she died. Despite my "anecdata", I am keeping a close eye on these sort of findings, to see if my brain is going to go the same way. I've certainly had a higher pollution load in my life to date than either of them. :/
I believe the problem is that my body is not able to metabolize the toxic air molecules that gets to my bloodstream through my lungs.
Just today my GP suggested getting an inhaler. And I just found out a guy I work with got an inhaler last week.
It’s insane how bad the air pollution is, estimated to cause 40k premature deaths each year.
Meanwhile the government hardly does anything (though see below). People feel it’s their divine right to drive old dirty diesel vehicles and how dare the government impose any restriction on this polluting behaviour.
Luckily London just set up the ULEZ (ultra low emission zone) in a small part of central London, making older dirty cars pay a fee if they enter. But they’re not extending the ULEZ to Greater London for another two and a half years. Or another 100k premature deaths.
And the government does nothing. Except speed bumps, which people complain about, mandatory car maintenance, which people complain about, traffic lights everywhere, which people complain about, speed cameras, which people complain about, regulate emissions, which people complain about.
What I could find about the latest standards does not seem to support your claim. But maybe I'm looking at wrong numbers or misinterpreting them, so I wouldn't mind looking at your own sources if you have them.
EURO 6d standards for diesel passenger cars [1]:
- CO: 0.5 g/km
- NOx: 0.080 g/km
- PM: 0.0045 g/km
California LEV standards for passenger cars <50K miles/5 years [2]. (Not the same as EPA, but I assume California is more strict):
- CO: 3.4 g/mi = 2.1 g/km
- NOx: 0.2 g/mi = 0.12 g/km
- PM: 0.08 g/mi = 0.05 g/km
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards
This page indicates hypothyroidism is a result of iodine deficiency, rather than excess. Hyperthyroidism may be caused by excess iodine.
It can be both. Also, too much iodine can cause thyroid inflammation and cancer.
Meanwhile, the situation in London is similar in South Korea [2]. Most likely, worse: South Korean government is afraid of further regulating the domestic industry, when it should. Over the past decade or so, Chinese government has moved a lot of their factories to the East coast which faces SK in the West. Both SK and Chinese citizens must acknowledge this is a mutually-interested issue and take concrete steps to collaborate while minimizing finger pointing. I am convinced this is a tractable scientific and social/diplomatic problem. One proposal is to set up a joint government-backed venture/think tank that incrementally tackles this issue at a tech/policy level. Such a small step but no where near it...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/13/social-d...
Here is a demonstration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A8Yink0czc
I myself run one in my home but just place the filter behind and against the fan allowing the airflow to keep it in place.
Works wonders and I can see a noticeable difference in air quality and sleep (allergens, odors, etc)
(I used to own an expensive air filter that was top-rated by Consumer Reports at the time, but sold it during a minimalism phase. Now I want to try a filter again, this pollen season, but more frugally.)
I use a 3M room filter for white noise generation for my kids. Has worked very well for 7 years! (I believe I got asthma growing up around dust).
I developed a persistent cough after moving from Shanghai to Santa Cruz, California, but it would be hard to blame that on air pollution.
And it turns out it was probably infection with Heliobacter Pylori.
1) The title of this article is bad. In epidemiologic terms, you shouldn't combine the words "seem" and "cause". Seem is about perception, is about possibility, whereas any science writer or epi researcher worth their salt is NOT going to use the term "cause" lightly. There may be an association, a correlation, a linkage even, but cause? No no, dementia is a very broad disease with many potential causes, and likely you will never establish a singular cause for that disease.
2) Regarding the talk I attended itself, there is a wildly broad definition of air pollution out there. Are you talking about ozone, NOx, or particulate matter, and what SIZE of particulate matter? How do you measure lifetime exposure or recent exposure for those moving, and for the dynamic process that is air quality? Then, how do you control for community and cultural based effects of living in certain areas - maybe those with other risk factors are also those forced by poverty/etc. to live in the polluted areas.
Summarily, IMHO, air pollution is a contributing factor to dementia, but alone I doubt it'd be sufficient without age-related degeneration, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, stress, underlying genetics/alleles/mutations, etc. There are probably around 10-20 important factors of which air pollution is one.
As a society, let's ditch ICE vehicles, let's ditch coal and dirty industrial practices, both for our planet and for our own health.
What can you do now? Stop idling your car, use your brakes as little as possible (i.e. drive efficiently, don't speed up just to have to brake soon), don't go out in hot summer weather, support renewable energy, oppose coal/dirty diesel/inefficient fossil fuel use, and generally vote for politicians who agree with the above and don't take dirty fossil money.
I documented myself on a YouTube channel as I could sense homelessness looming, and have been keeping pretty extensive logs so that it won't be assumed that I became homeless due to my degraded state when they find my body (post hoc ergo propter hoc).
I remember how kindly people treated dogs during the wildfires. With all luck, I'll be as intelligent as a dog soon.
Brake dust is gnarly stuff for your health.
Are you homeless experimentally or out of necessity?
Is it just me or does this seem very flimsy? Sounds like this model catches very few cases, and there is no mention in TFA of how many false positives were found. The quasi-causal study sounds a bit better, but judging by how much the article seems to have overplayed the correlational studies, I have a feeling the quasi-causal study isn't that good either
"$BAD_THING might happen to you watch out!" Omg. Might need one of these[0]; they say this one's a good model.
1. Someone asks how can they measure air in their home/workplace
2. Followed by casual name dropping of CO2 sensors or air particle/quality sensors.
No data to back this up just possibly too much aluminium wrapped around my head.
So if you use a naive filter you’ll be more suspicious of the one case but not the other. But the baseline probability of product mentions is way higher for domains that require products! You can see from my karma and general comment history though that I didn’t make an account to do this. I’ve had an account 8 years and am interested in air quality, to the puzzlement of my peers.
If there were new accounts repeatedly dropping the same products, that would be suspicious. Did that happen?
Maybe what's happening is that after an unfortunately long delay, society is finally coming around to a long overdue conclusion. Some phenomena seem to flip from "absurd" to "obvious" very quickly (gay-marriage, marijuana) once they get a certain critical mass.
>the most commonly used grades of avgas still contain tetraethyllead (TEL), a toxic substance used to prevent engine knocking (detonation), with ongoing experiments aimed at eventually reducing or eliminating the use of TEL in aviation gasoline
Yeah. But those aircraft don't tend to inhabit the airspace around cities. Pretty much all small commercial aviation in the lower 48 is going to be running turboprops that use normal jet fuel (basically diesel). A suburban airport that actually has a meaningful GA presence is going to put far more lead into the air.
I mean, that's kind of broad.
Not as DNA. The main thing that controls evolution is failure to reproduce. Life experiences have only a very short term effect on how DNA is packaged.
it will always be a new mutation
A "mutation" is not the same thing as a "permutation". The combination of DNA from two parents is not itself mutation.
And I know you are worried about what the next generation breathes, but consider that what you were exposed to was much worse, and what your parents were exposed to was worse still, and if your grandparents lived in cities they experienced awful pollution, second only to perhaps what your great grandparents may have been exposed to during the industrial revolution. Air quality has gotten better than it was in 1980 and much better than 1880, but there is still a long way to go to reset the damage of rampant consumer culture on our environment and health.
Your bodies DNA replication machinery also has an error rate which can be worked out, and you can extrapolate that to get a rate of mutation. Knowing this rate can give you an estimate of how long ago two species diverged based on the number of different bases when you line up their DNA sequences against eachother, for example.
You've got it backwards. DNA doesn't "evolve to addapt". Variations get copied and passed down except for those within individuals that didn't reproduce. Sometimes an entire lineage doesn't reproduce, that's extinction. So, there's no "eventually".
Our bodies may not be "fully" understood. But there's no points for an argument from ignorance.
Still there may be people that live to 90 without getting dementia in heavily polluted cities. However, that's down to natural variation.