United States: A new study warns that people in Southern California who were actually exposed to a lot of wildfire smoke over ten years have really very higher risk of developing dementia. The study found that the pollution from wildfires might be more harmful to the brain than pollution from factories or car exhaust.
That “was also associated with an 18 percent increase in the odds of being diagnosed with dementia,” said a team led by Joan Casey, over the long term. In Seattle, she is an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington.
As reported by the HealthDay, the new study analyzed health data for more than 1.2 million Kaiser Permanente Southern California health system members. Participants were tracked for the years from 2008 to 2019.
Casey’s team then related changes in each member’s neurological health to local wildfires to which they’d been exposed. The blazes are on the rise in southern California because of climate change.
Investigators peered specifically at an airborne pollutant called PM 2.5. It’s so small it is a product of combustion that can permeate deep into the lungs, and even cross the brain blood barrier.
But studies of PM 2.5 from industry or motor vehicles have long shown that it is ‘associated with incident dementia,’ the researchers said.
Would PM 2.5 generated by wildfires be any different from PM 2.5 added by vehicular traffic on a city street or a freeway?
The study results show it could be much more damaging to the brain than other forms of the lung pollutant PM 2.5.
Likewise, people had 18% increased odds of dementia if long term high exposure to wildfire particulate matter but just 1% if they were long term high exposed to PM 2.5 from other sources, the researchers calculated.
But people from certain groups seemed particularly at risk out of the more than 1.2 million Californians covered by the study.
Finally, people who started the study younger than 75 had greater vulnerability to smoke linked brain harm than older people, as did folks living in poorer areas, who appeared to be more susceptible to dementia because of wildfire smoke.
