Living near major roads linked to risk of dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and MS

Posted on January 24, 2020 by Respro® UK Ltd

Living near major roads or highways is linked to higher incidence of dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis (MS), suggests new research published this week in the journal Environmental Health.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia analyzed data for 678,000 adults in Metro Vancouver. They found that living less than 50 metres from a major road or less than 150 metres from a highway is associated with a higher risk of developing dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and MS — likely due to increased exposure to air pollution.

The researchers also found that living near green spaces, like parks, has protective effects against developing these neurological disorders.

“For the first time, we have confirmed a link between air pollution and traffic proximity with a higher risk of dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and MS at the population level,” says Weiran Yuchi, the study’s lead author and a PhD candidate in the UBC school of population and public health. “The good news is that green spaces appear to have some protective effects in reducing the risk of developing one or more of these disorders. More research is needed, but our findings do suggest that urban planning efforts to increase accessibility to green spaces and to reduce motor vehicle traffic would be beneficial for neurological health.”

Neurological disorders — a term that describes a range of disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and motor neuron diseases — are increasingly recognized as one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. Little is known about the risk factors associated with neurological disorders, the majority of which are incurable and typically worsen over time.

For the study, researchers analyzed data for 678,000 adults between the ages of 45 and 84 who lived in Metro Vancouver from 1994 to 1998 and during a follow-up period from 1999 to 2003. They estimated individual exposures to road proximity, air pollution, noise and greenness at each person’s residence using postal code data. During the follow-up period, the researchers identified 13,170 cases of non-Alzheimer’s dementia, 4,201 cases of Parkinson’s disease, 1,277 cases of Alzheimer’s disease and 658 cases of MS.

For non-Alzheimer’s dementia and Parkinson’s disease specifically, living near major roads or a highway was associated with 14 per cent and seven per cent increased risk of both conditions, respectively. Due to relatively low numbers of Alzheimer’s and MS cases in Metro Vancouver compared to non-Alzheimer’s dementia and Parkinson’s disease, the researchers did not identify associations between air pollution and increased risk of these two disorders. However, they are now analyzing Canada-wide data and are hopeful the larger dataset will provide more information on the effects of air pollution on Alzheimer’s disease and MS.

When the researchers accounted for green space, they found the effect of air pollution on the neurological disorders was mitigated. The researchers suggest that this protective effect could be due to several factors.

“For people who are exposed to a higher level of green space, they are more likely to be physically active and may also have more social interactions,” said Michael Brauer, the study’s senior author and professor in the UBC school of population and public health. “There may even be benefits from just the visual aspects of vegetation.”

Brauer added that the findings underscore the importance for city planners to ensure they incorporate greenery and parks when planning and developing residential neighbourhoods.

The study was co-authored by Hind Sbihi, Hugh Davies, and Lillian Tamburic in the UBC school of population and public health.

via Living near major roads linked to risk of dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and MS — ScienceDaily

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Global Transport of Australian Bushfire Smoke – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

Posted on January 24, 2020 by Respro® UK Ltd
In this video, different aerosols are highlighted by color, including dust (orange), sea salt (blue), nitrates (pink) and carbonaceous (red), with brighter regions corresponding to higher aerosol amounts.

This animation shows several high impact events across the globe between August 2019 and January 2020, including Hurricane Dorian (August to September 2019), major fire events in South America and Indonesia (August to September 2019), and extreme wildfires in Australia (December 2019 to January 2020).

The local impacts of the Australian bushfires have been devastating to property and life in the country, while producing extreme air quality impacts throughout the region.

As smoke from the massive fires has interacted with global weather, the transport of smoke plumes around the globe has accelerated into the upper troposphere and even the lowermost stratosphere, leading to long-range transport around the globe.

The smoke from these bushfires will travel across the Southern Ocean, completing a global circumnavigation back around to Australia, and is particularly pronounced across the southern Pacific Ocean out to South America.

via Global Transport of Australian Bushfire Smoke – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Air pollution in New York City linked to wildfires hundreds of miles away

Posted on January 23, 2020 by Respro® UK Ltd

A new study shows that air pollutants from the smoke of fires from as far as Canada and the southeastern U.S. traveled hundreds of miles and several days to reach Connecticut and New York City, where it caused significant increases in pollution concentrations.

For the study, published 21 January in the European Geosciences Union (EGU) journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, researchers in the lab of Drew Gentner, associate professor of chemical & environmental engineering, monitored the air quality at the Yale Coastal Field Station in Guilford, CT and four other sites in the New York metropolitan area. In August of 2018, they observed two spikes in the presence of air pollutants — both coinciding with New York-area air quality advisories for ozone. The pollutants were the kind found in the smoke of wildfires and controlled agricultural burning. Using three types of evidence — data from the observation sites, smoke maps from satellite imagery, and backtracking 3-D models of air parcels (both the maps and models were produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) — the researchers traced the pollutants’ origin in the first event to fires on the western coast of Canada, and in the second event to the southeastern U.S.

Biomass burning, which occurs on a large scale during wildfires and some controlled burns, is a major source of air pollutants that impact air quality, human health, and climate. These events release numerous gases into the atmosphere and produce particulate matter (PM), including black carbon (BC) and other primary organic aerosols (POA) with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers. Known as PM2.5, it has been shown to have particularly serious health effects when inhaled.

While more reactive components are often chemically transformed closer to their place of origin, PM2.5 tends to last longer. In the case of this study, that allowed much of it to travel from the fires to the monitoring sites — a period ranging from a few days to about a week.

“Given the sensitivity of people to the health effects emerging from exposure to PM2.5, this is certainly something that needs to be considered as policy-makers put together long-term air quality management plans,” Gentner said.

The impacts of wildfire smoke will likely become increasingly important in the coming years.

“When people are making predictions about climate change, they’re predicting increases in wildfires, so this sort of pollution is likely going to become more common,” said lead author Haley Rogers, who was an undergraduate student when the study was conducted. “So when people are planning for air pollution and health impacts, you can’t just address local sources.”

Although the levels of the PM2.5 decreased over time and distance, co-author Jenna Ditto, a graduate student in Gentner’s lab, noted that awareness of its presence in the atmosphere is critical to public health.

“Studies indicate that there are no safe levels of PM2.5, so typically any level of it is worth taking a look at,” she said.

via Air pollution in New York City linked to wildfires hundreds of miles away — ScienceDaily

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Air pollution’s tiny particles may trigger nonfatal heart attacks

Posted on January 21, 2020 by Respro® UK Ltd

A Yale-affiliated scientist finds that even a few hours’ exposure to ambient ultrafine particles common in air pollution may potentially trigger a nonfatal heart attack.

Myocardial infarction (MI) is a major form of cardiovascular disease worldwide. Ultrafine particles (UFP) are 100 nanometers or smaller in size. In urban areas, automobile emissions are the primary source of UFP.

The study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives is believed to be the first epidemiological investigation of the effects of UFP exposure and heart attacks using the number of particles and the particle length and surface area concentrations at hourly intervals of exposure.

“This study confirms something that has long been suspected—air pollution’s tiny particles can play a role in serious heart disease. This is particularly true within the first few hours of exposure,” said Kai Chen, Ph.D., assistant professor at Yale School of Public Health and the study’s first author. “Elevated levels of UFP are a serious public health concern.”

UFP constitute a health risk due to their small size, large surface areas per unit of mass, and their ability to penetrate the cells and get into the blood system. “We were the first to demonstrate the effects of UFP on the health of asthmatics in an epidemiological study in the 1990s,” said Annette Peters, director of the Institute of Epidemiology at Helmholtz Center Munich and a co-author of this paper. “Since then approximately 200 additional studies have been published. However, epidemiological evidence remains inconsistent and insufficient to infer a causal relationship.”

The lack of consistent findings across epidemiological studies may be in part because of the different size ranges and exposure metrics examined to characterize ambient UFP exposure. Chen and his co-authors were interested in whether transient UFP exposure could trigger heart attacks and whether alternative metrics such as particle length and surface area concentrations could improve the investigation of UFP-related health effects.

With colleagues from Helmholtz Center Munich, Augsburg University Hospital and Nördlingen Hospital, Chen examined data from a registry of all nonfatal MI cases in Augsburg, Germany. The study looked at more than 5, 898 nonfatal heart attack patients between 2005 and 2015. The individual heart attacks were compared against air pollution UFP data on the hour of the heart attack and adjusted for a range of additional factors, such as the day of the week, long-term time trend and socioeconomic status.

“This represents an important step toward understanding the appropriate indicator of ultrafine particles exposure in determining the short-term health effects, as the effects of particle length and surface concentrations were stronger than the ones of particle number concentration and remained similar after adjustment for other air pollutants,” said Chen. “Our future analyses will examine the combined hourly exposures to both air pollution and extreme temperature. We will also identify vulnerable subpopulations regarding pre-existing diseases and medication intake.”

via Air pollution’s tiny particles may trigger nonfatal heart attacks

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Brazilian wildfire pollution worsens air quality in distant cities – study

Posted on January 21, 2020 by Respro® UK Ltd

Wildfires in south eastern Brazil produce airborne pollution that worsens air quality in major cities such as Sao Paulo – cancelling out efforts to improve the urban environment and posing health risks to citizens, according to a new study.

The planet is frequently affected by smoke from fires caused by humans and natural processes. Australia, California and other regions are prone to seasonal wildfires and smoke from wildfires and agricultural burns worsening air quality in places up to 2,000 km away.

Most wildfires in Brazil occur in the dry season between July and September in the areas of Amazon and Cerrado – mostly agriculture-related fires – and the Pampas. Depending on the weather, long-range transport of smoke affects the air quality of small and large cities downwind of the fire spots, including the ‘megacity’ of Sao Paulo.

Burning biomass produces increased quantities of low-lying ozone due, in part, to the South Atlantic subtropical high pressure system. Transported considerable distances from the fire, this pollution further contribute to poor air quality and smog in cities such as Sao Paulo.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham, the Federal University of Technology, Londrina, Brazil, and the University of Stockholm published their findings in the Journal of Environmental Management.

Professor Roy Harrison, from the University of Birmingham, commented: “The state of Sao Paulo has led with progressive measures to curb air pollution, such as controlling sulphur dioxide from industrial sources and enforcing standards for cleaner vehicles and fuels.

“However, present results indicate that policies targeting the reduction of biomass burning are of utmost importance to improve urban air quality, particularly in densely populated areas where high pollutant concentrations are frequently observed.”

Besides affecting air quality and increasing the risk of death from respiratory causes, ozone is a short-lived climate forcer – an atmospheric compound with a warming effect but with a shorter lifetime than carbon dioxide. Reducing ozone levels has two main benefits: reducing impact on air quality and climate.

Atmospheric emission data suggests that emissions from biomass burning make up a substantial part of the precursors for O3 formation.

Dr. Admir Créso Targino, from the Federal University of Technology, commented: “We need enhanced governance at regional, national and international levels to combat biomass burning practices in Brazil and its neighbouring countries.

Not only would the population health benefit from such a measure, but also the regional climate, as ozone and particulate matter generated by the fires are short-lived climate forcers. Such an approach would be well-aligned with the Paris Agreement that aims to limit global warming to below 2OC compared to the pre-industrial period – a critical measure in the fight against climate change.”

Researchers combined in situ ozone data, measured in the states of Sao Paulo and Parana from 2014 to 2017, with information about a range of co-pollutants such as NOx, PM2.5 and PM10 to identify sources, transport and geographical patterns in the air pollution data.

Ozone concentrations peaked in September and October – linked to biomass burning and enhanced photochemistry. Long-range transport of smoke contributed to between 23 and 41 per cent of the total ozone during the pollution events.

via Brazilian wildfire pollution worsens air quality in distant cities – study

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Study Shows Air Pollution Can Mess With Our DNA

Posted on January 20, 2020 by Respro® UK Ltd

Air pollution makes it difficult to breathe and it can also increase the blood pressure and heart rate of the person. Those issues are well known. Now new research suggests breathing diesel fumes can trigger another toxic and dangerous change. It can inappropriately turn some genes on while turning some genes off.

A gene is a segment of our DNA that tells the cells of our body what to do and when to do it. Genes can be controlled by a chemical switch, also known as a methyl group. Methyl groups can cause a chemical reaction called methylation, thus affecting a component of DNA. This then tends to happen near a gene. If a methyl group is added, it can turn some gene off. The opposite tends to happen when you take a methyl group away or if you demethylate a gene. Either change can affect health.

That can be a good thing. The body can naturally produce methyl groups and it can allow it to turn off genes when their action is no longer needed. The factors outside the body, like air pollutants, may step in inappropriately and it may add methyl groups to DNA. They might remove methyl groups. These environmental changes can hijack the genes and they can change when or what they instruct the cells to do.

Harmful effects of air pollution

The study of methylation’s role in gene action is named epigenetics. Epigenetics describes the changes that could happen outside of your DNA. These changes do not harm DNA. Instead, epigenetics may silence a gene or it can switch some gene on at the wrong time.

Researchers also stated that breathing diesel fumes of two hours can already have an epigenetic effect. It was done by the researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. They gathered 16 volunteers in an enclosed booth. The booth was about the same size as that of a small bathroom. They had the volunteer go inside the booth one by one and each of them remained there for at least two hours. They half breathed in clear air and the other half breathed air polluted with diesel fumes. The levels of that pollution were equal to the air along a highway in Beijing, China. The levels also might happen at rail yards, mines, busy ports, and industrial sites.

To check on the effects of pollution, the researchers looked at the blood of the volunteers. They compared the gathered samples collected before the experiment to those taken 6 and 30 hours after someone had sat in the exposure booth. The methyl groups changed at about 2,800 different points on the DNA of those who breathed in diesel fumes. Those changes affected 400 genes. No similar changes were seen among those breathing the clean air.

At some DNA locations, the exposure to diesel fumes added methyl groups. It reduced how many were present and that means that a switch that normally would turn off a gene was even more often flipped the other way. That could eventually lead to very high gene activity.

How these changes that are related to diesel might affect health is still not clear, according to Huawei Jiang, the author of the study. But the tests show that air pollution can alter the DNA. The data also showed that diseases like asthma might stem from prolonged episodes of methylation.

DNA changes in the body

Jiang stated that even short-term exposure can cause these types of changes. She hopes that other researches can identify the cumulative effects for someone who breathes in diesel fumes regularly. The findings of her team were published in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology.

via Study Shows Air Pollution Can Mess With Our DNA | Science Times

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Heating woes fuel Balkan smog crisis

Posted on January 17, 2020 by Respro® UK Ltd

As winter grips the Balkans, the poor are caught in a cruel bind, being forced to light fires at home for heating while fuelling a pollution crisis smothering the region.

In recent weeks, Balkan capitals from Belgrade Sarajevo to Skopje and Pristina have been ranked among the world’s top 10 most polluted major cities, according to the monitoring application AirVisual.

While these are small cities compared to leading Asian polluters like New Delhi and Dhaka, a combination of coal-fired power plants, old cars and fires to heat homes are pumping the air with toxins.

“I know it is polluting. I am not an idiot but my only other choice would be to heat this home with electricity and that is damn expensive,” said Trajan Nestorovski, who like many in his working-class Skopje neighbourhood burns wood to stay warm in winter.

His wife Vera added: “There are a couple of factories near our neighbourhood that are burning God knows what in the evenings”.

Thanks to the rise of mobile phone apps that measure air quality, like the local Moj Vozduh (My Air) created by a Macedonian developer, citizens are finally grasping the full extent of the crisis.

“Serbia is suffocating, has anyone seen the minister of the environment?”, said a recent headline in Belgrade’s local Blic newspaper, speaking of the fog and dirty air enveloping the city.

Protests have been erupting around the region in recent days.

In Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, young people have taken inspiration from Swedish activist Greta Thunberg by holding a spate of protests on Fridays.

“Greta inspired all of us,” said 17-year-old Iskra Ilieska.

“In winter, half of my school class is absent because of lung problems. That is not normal,” she said.

In neighbouring Bosnia, several hundred people wearing face masks gathered in the city of Tuzla this week to demand a plan from authorities to tackle pollution and phase out coal-fired plants in the next five years.

“The only recommended measures are that we stay shut up at home… when you go out on the streets, in the playgrounds, you won’t see children anywhere,” said Alisa Kasumovic, a mother in her forties.

– Silent killer –

According to a recent UN environment report, air pollution causes nearly 20 percent of premature deaths in 19 Western Balkan cities.

The main sources of the dust, soot and smoke are low-grade coal plants and household heating, the report said.

More than 60 percent of people in the region rely on coal and firewood to heat their homes, the report said. Only 12 percent of buildings are connected to district heating systems.

Governments need to make “clean energy more accessible”, ban old polluting vehicles and tighten regulations on industry emissions and power plants, the UN urged.

Many people cannot afford cleaner heating options at home in countries where average wages are around 500 euros or less.

Sali Ademi, a 78-year-old in Kosovo’s capital Pristina, uses coal.

“There’s no worse thing, but what can you do?” he said in a city whose air is already poisoned by two nearby coal-fired power plants running on outdated technology.

– Cable car escape –

Those who warm their homes with fires also bear the brunt of health risks, according to experts.

“Some of the emissions from these stoves stay in the house and poison them,” warned Anes Podic, president of an environmental group in Bosnia who has called on the government to replace inefficient wood stoves in the country.

In cities like Sarajevo and Skopje, a circle of mountains helps trap the hazardous air in the valleys where residents live.

Sakiba Sahman, 60, is a Sarajevan taking advantage of a recent reduction on ticket prices for a cable car that rides to the top of the 1,160-metre-high (3,800-foot-high) Mount Trebevic, which peaks above the smog over the Bosnian capital.

“We’ve come to spend a few hours to ventilate the lungs,” she told AFP.

Down below, “the pollution is enormous, there are a lot of cars, everything is dirty, grey and depressing.”

via Heating woes fuel Balkan smog crisis – France 24

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Mask-wearing Bosnians take to streets in air pollution protest

Posted on January 16, 2020 by Respro® UK Ltd

Hundreds of protesters wearing white masks took to the streets of the Bosnian town of Tuzla on Wednesday to demand government action on air pollution affecting public health in the region.

Bosnian towns, led by the capital Sarajevo, have topped lists of the world’s most polluted cities in recent days, along with capitals of neighbouring Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia.

Most Western Balkan countries still get electricity from outdated socialist-era coal-fired plants, while a growing number of impoverished people burn coal for heating in winter time and streets are crammed with old vehicles, raising pollution levels.

There was no immediate response from the Tuzla government to the protest but it has issued warning for citizens, especially for vulnerable groups such as children and pregnant women, to stay indoors because of dangerous air pollution.

The Sarajevo cantonal government is due to convene an emergency session on Friday to discuss further measures to curb pollution. The government declared an “episode of alarm” at the weekend, banning some vehicles from the roads and warning citizens to stay indoor or go to the nearby mountains.

The Tuzla protesters, organised by 15 NGOs, carried a banner reading “We Want to Breathe with Full Lungs”.

“I came to support the initiative demanding that finally something should be done against this terrible pollution in which we are forced to live,” said Vladislav Vlajic, adding that the city was not investing enough to connect individual households to the central heating system.

Unless concrete measures are taken, people will leave Tuzla to protect their health, Vlajic said.

Physicians warn that respiratory diseases caused by air pollution have been rising, especially among young children, in Tuzla, where there is a 715 MW coal-fired plant, and now account for 20% of all lung diseases.

Sarajevo ranked top of air quality monitor AirVisual’s major polluted cities on Wednesday, with an air quality index of 399, a level deemed unhealthy and worse than Dhaka in Bangladesh, Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia and Delhi in India.

On Sunday, it measured 548 in the Bosnian capital.

Belgrade, where the Serbian government held an emergency session on Wednesday to discuss how to curb air pollution levels, was ranked eighth on the same list.

via Mask-wearing Bosnians take to streets in air pollution protest – Reuters

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