• The Polluted Brain
    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/brain-pollution-evidence-builds-dirty-air-causes-alzheimer-s-dementia

    The link between air pollution and dementia remains controversial—even its proponents warn that more research is needed to confirm a causal connection and work out just how the particles might enter the brain and make mischief there. But a growing number of epidemiological studies from around the world, new findings from animal models and human brain imaging studies, and increasingly sophisticated techniques for modeling #PM2.5 exposures have raised alarms. Indeed, in an 11-year epidemiological study to be published next week in Translational Psychiatry, USC researchers will report that living in places with PM2.5 exposures higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) standard of 12 µg/m3 nearly doubled dementia risk in older women. If the finding holds up in the general population, air pollution could account for roughly 21% of dementia cases worldwide, says the study’s senior author, epidemiologist Jiu-Chiuan Chen of the Keck School of Medicine at USC.

    Deepening the concerns, this month researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada reported in The Lancet that among 6.6 million people in the province of Ontario, those living within 50 meters of a major road—where levels of fine pollutants are often 10 times higher than just 150 meters away—were 12% more likely to develop dementia than people living more than 200 meters away.

    #pollution #air #cerveau #démence #santé

    • Plus prosaïquement, comme bouseuse étudiant à Paris, j’avais noté de subtiles mais bien réelles différences de performances cognitives entre la ville et la cambrousse. Après, il y a de fortes chances que ce soit multifactoriel : la pollution, certes, et une sorte de sous-oxygénation du cerveau, mais aussi la sur-stimulation permanente du milieu urbain, un état de stress récurrent, l’agression sonore à laquelle on ne peut échapper, la difficulté à voir loin, la rareté de la ligne d’horizon, etc.