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EFFECTS OF AIR POLLUTION - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Research by EPA and others has found that exposure to increased concentrations of PM2.5 over a few hours to weeks can trigger cardiovascular disease-related heart attacks and death. Longer-term exposure can lead to increased risk of cardiovascular mortality and decreases in life expectancy
        
        PM stands for particulate matter (also called particle pollution): the term for a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets found in the air. Some particles, such as dust, dirt, soot, or smoke, are large or dark enough to be seen with the naked eye. Others are so small they can only be detected using an electron microscope.
      - When you breathe in poor quality air, the air pollutants can travel deep into your bloodstream through your lungs, and to your heart. This can increase your risk of developing heart and circulatory diseases.
        
        Air pollutants can:
        
        Damage your blood vessels by making them narrower and harder
    - - How do air pollutants affect mental health?
        Research regarding the neurological effects of air pollution found increased brain inflammation resulting from PM exposure. Increased levels of cytokines, molecules that regulate the body’s inflammatory response, are correlated with anxiety and depression. Long-term neuroinflammation is also a factor in many central nervous system disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
- - - - Climate Change
      - Melting Of Icebergs
      - Global Warming
    - - Established(1987) to phase out substances that deplete ozone
      - In summary, air pollution affects human health. The quality of air affects our health, interpersonal behavior, mood, attitudes, outdoor activities, outdoor activities, and others. Most research on air pollution effects on health tend to concentrate more on physical outcomes such as mortality or diseases. I would suggest the need to look at air quality in terms of policy strategies that may be linked to air quality such as discomfort, irritability, depression, and anxiety.
        There is a need to document the adverse effects of different air pollutants on human health, and this should include diseases and the estimated reduction in life expectancy as a result of toxic air. All evidence of increased mortality in highly polluted areas needs to be documented. Relevant authorities must implement regulations by authorities to minimize emissions of toxic air substances. In essence, there is a need for accurate information on the effects of air pollution on health as a basis for establishing effective strategies to minimize these effects.
- - - - B/w 1980-2011, 9 Billion Dollars worth Soybeans and Corns lost in US due to air pollution
        
        Randy Nelson, PhD, a professor of neuroscience at the Ohio State University, is using mouse studies to find some answers. With his doctoral student Laura Fonken and colleagues, he exposed mice to high levels of fine particulate air pollution five times a week, eight hours a day, to mimic the exposure a human commuter might receive if he or she lived in the suburbs and worked in a smoggy city (Molecular Psychiatry, 2011). After 10 months, they found that the mice that had been exposed to polluted air took longer to learn a maze task and made more mistakes than mice that had not breathed in the pollution.
        
        Nelson also found that the pollutant-exposed mice showed signs of the rodent equivalent of depression. Mice said to express depressive-like symptoms give up swimming more quickly in a forced swim test and stop sipping sugar water that they normally find attractive. Both behaviors can be reversed with antidepressants. Nelson found that mice exposed to the polluted air scored higher on tests of depressive-like responses.
        
        To find out more about the underlying cause of those behavioral changes, Nelson compared the brains of mice that had been exposed to dirty air with brains of mice that hadn't. He found a number of striking differences. For starters, mice exposed to particulate matter had increased levels of cytokines in the brain. (Cytokines are cell-signaling molecules that regulate the body's inflammatory response.) That wasn't entirely surprising, since previous studies investigating the cardiovascular effects of air pollution on mice had found widespread bodily inflammation in mice exposed to the pollution.
        
        More surprisingly, Nelson also discovered physical changes to the nerve cells in the mouse hippocampus, a region known to play a role in spatial memory. Exposed mice had fewer spines on the tips of the neurons in this brain region. "Those [spines] form the connections to other cells," Nelson says. "So you have less dendritic complexity, and that's usually correlated with a poorer memory."
        
        The changes are alarming and surprising, he says. "I never thought we'd actually see changes in brain structure."
        
        Nelson's mice experienced quite high levels of pollution, on par with those seen in places such as Mexico City and Beijing, which rank higher on the pollution scale than U.S. cities. It's not yet clear whether the same changes would occur in mice exposed to pollution levels more typical of American cities. Another limitation, he notes, is that the animals in his study were genetically identical. Nelson says he'd like to see similar studies of wild-type mice to help tease out whether genetic differences might make some people more or less vulnerable to the effects of pollution. "I would suspect there are people who are wildly susceptible to this and people who are less so, or not at all," he says.