Is pollution linked to psychiatric disorders?

Summary: Poor air quality has been linked to higher rates of bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. Exposure to air pollution during the first ten years of like is also associated with a more than two-fold increased risk of schizophrenia and personality disorders.

Source: PLOS

Researchers are increasingly studying the effects of environmental insults on psychiatric and neurological conditions, motivated by emerging evidence from environmental events like the record-breaking smog that choked New Delhi two years ago. The results of a new study publishing August 20 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by an international group of researchers using large data sets from the US and Denmark suggests a possible link between exposure to environmental pollution and an increase in the prevalence of psychiatric disorders.

The team found that poor air quality was associated with higher rates of bipolar disorder and major depression in both US and Danish populations. The trend appeared even stronger in Denmark, where exposure to polluted air during the first ten years of a person’s life also predicted a more than two-fold increase in schizophrenia and personality disorders.

“Our study shows that living in polluted areas, especially early on in life, is predictive of mental disorders in both the United States and Denmark,” said computational biologist Atif Khan, the first author of the new study. “The physical environment – in particular air quality – warrants more research to better understand how our environment is contributing to neurological and psychiatric disorders.”

Although mental illnesses like schizophrenia develop due to a complex interplay of genetic predispositions and life experiences or exposures, genetics alone does not account entirely for variations in mental health and disease. Researchers have long suspected that genetic, neurochemical and environmental factors interact at different levels to affect the onset, severity and progression of these illnesses.

Growing evidence is beginning to provide insight into how components of air pollution can be toxic to the brain: Recent studies on rodents suggest that environmental agents like ambient small particulate matter (fine dust) travel to the brain through the nose and lungs, while animals exposed to pollution have also shown signs of cognitive impairment and depression-like behavioral symptoms.

“We hypothesized that pollutants might affect our brains through neuroinflammatory pathways that have also been shown to cause depression-like signs in animal studies,” said Andrey Rzhetsky, who led the new study.

To quantify air pollution exposure among individuals in the United States, the University of Chicago team relied on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s measurements of 87 air quality measurements. For individuals in Denmark, they used a national pollution register that tracked a smaller number of pollutants with much higher spatial resolution.

The researchers then examined two population data sets, the first being a U.S. health insurance claims database that included 11 years of claims for 151 million individuals. The second dataset consisted of all 1.4 million individuals born in Denmark from 1979 through 2002 who were alive and residing in Denmark at their tenth birthday. Because Danes are assigned unique identification numbers that can link information from various national registries, the researchers were able to estimate exposure to air pollution at the individual level during the first ten years of their life. In the US study, exposure measurements were limited to the county level. “We strived to provide validation of association results in independent large datasets,” said Rzhetsky.

The findings have not been without controversy. “This study on psychiatric disorders is counterintuitive and generated considerable resistance from reviewers,” said Rzhetsky. Indeed, the divided opinions of the expert reviewers prompted PLOS Biology to commission a special companion article from Prof. John Ioannidis of Stanford University (Ioannidis is unconnected with the study, but assisted the journal with the editorial process).

This shows a smoke stack
To quantify air pollution exposure among individuals in the United States, the University of Chicago team relied on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s measurements of 87 air quality measurements. The image is in the public domain.

“A causal association of air pollution with mental diseases is an intriguing possibility. Despite analyses involving large datasets, the available evidence has substantial shortcomings and a long series of potential biases may invalidate the observed associations,” says Ioannidis in his commentary. “More analyses by multiple investigators, including contrarians, are necessary.”

Rzhetsky also cautioned that the significant associations between air pollution and psychiatric disorders discovered in the study do not necessarily mean causation, and said that further research is needed to assess whether any neuroinflammatory impacts of air pollution share common pathways with other stress-induced conditions.

Funding: This work was funded by the NordForsk project 75007: Understanding the Link Between Air Pollution and Distribution of Related Health Impacts and Welfare in the Nordic countries (NordicWelfAir); the DARPA Big Mechanism program under ARO contract W911NF1410333; by National Institutes of Health grants R01HL122712, 1P50MH094267, and U01HL108634-01; and by a gift from Liz and Kent Dauten. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

About this neuroscience research article

Source:
PLOS
Media Contacts:
Andrey Rzhetsky – PLOS
Image Source:
The image is in the public domain.

Original Research: Open access
“Environmental pollution is associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorders in the US and Denmark”. Khan A, Plana-Ripoll O, Antonsen S, Brandt J, Geels C, Landecker H, et al.
PLOS Biology. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3000353

Abstract

Environmental pollution is associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorders in the US and Denmark

The search for the genetic factors underlying complex neuropsychiatric disorders has proceeded apace in the past decade. Despite some advances in identifying genetic variants associated with psychiatric disorders, most variants have small individual contributions to risk. By contrast, disease risk increase appears to be less subtle for disease-predisposing environmental insults. In this study, we sought to identify associations between environmental pollution and risk of neuropsychiatric disorders. We present exploratory analyses of 2 independent, very large datasets: 151 million unique individuals, represented in a United States insurance claims dataset, and 1.4 million unique individuals documented in Danish national treatment registers. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) county-level environmental quality indices (EQIs) in the US and individual-level exposure to air pollution in Denmark were used to assess the association between pollution exposure and the risk of neuropsychiatric disorders. These results show that air pollution is significantly associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorders. We hypothesize that pollutants affect the human brain via neuroinflammatory pathways that have also been shown to cause depression-like phenotypes in animal studies.

Feel free to share this Psychology News.
Join our Newsletter
I agree to have my personal information transferred to AWeber for Neuroscience Newsletter ( more information )
Sign up to receive our recent neuroscience headlines and summaries sent to your email once a day, totally free.
We hate spam and only use your email to contact you about newsletters. You can cancel your subscription any time.