Air pollution can trigger Alzheimer's in aged women:
Women in their 70s and 80s who were exposed to higher levels of air
pollution experienced greater declines in memory and more
Alzheimer's-like brain atrophy than their counterparts who breathed
cleaner air, new research has revealed.
What scientists haven't known is whether PM2.5 alters brain structure and accelerates memory decline.
Those brain scans were scored on the basis of their similarity to Alzheimer's disease patterns by a machine learning tool that had been "trained" via brain scans of people with Alzheimer's disease.
When all that information was combined, researchers could see the association between higher pollution exposure, brain changes and memory problems
-- even after adjusting to take into account differences in income,
education, race, geographic region, cigarette smoking and other factors.
"Our
hope is that by better understanding the underlying brain changes caused
by air pollution, researchers will be able to develop interventions to
help people with or at risk for cognitive decline," the researcher added.
"This is the first study to really show, in a statistical model, that air pollution was associated with changes in people's brains and that those changes were then connected with declines in memory performance," said the study researcher.
What did previous research find?
Previous research has suggested that fine particle pollution exposure increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia.What scientists haven't known is whether PM2.5 alters brain structure and accelerates memory decline.
How was this study conducted?
For the study, researchers used data from 998 women, aged 73 to 87, who had up to two brain scans five years apart as part of the landmark Women's Health Initiative launched in 1993 by the US National Institutes of Health and enrolled more than 160,000 women to address questions about heart disease, cancer and osteoporosis.Those brain scans were scored on the basis of their similarity to Alzheimer's disease patterns by a machine learning tool that had been "trained" via brain scans of people with Alzheimer's disease.
The researchers also gathered information about where the 998 women lived, as well as environmental data from those locations to estimate their exposure to fine particle pollution.
"This study provides another piece of the Alzheimer's disease puzzle by identifying some of the brain changes linking air pollution and memory decline. Each research study gets us one step closer to solving the Alzheimer's disease epidemic," the researcher said.