Air pollution can wreck your mental health too

http://grist.org/climate-energy/air-pollution-can-wreck-your-mental-health-too/

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It’s not just the traffic that’s bumming him out.

***SNIP

Among the various psychological and neurological effects found by studies described in the APA report:

* “Older women who had been exposed to high levels of [particulate matter] experienced greater cognitive decline compared with other women their age.”

* “Kids exposed to greater levels of black carbon [soot] scored worse on tests of memory and verbal and nonverbal.”
“Children who had been exposed to higher levels of urban air pollutants known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons while in utero were more likely to experience attention problems and symptoms of anxiety and depression.”

* “Pollutant-exposed mice showed signs of the rodent equivalent of depression. [They demonstrated] depressive-like symptoms [such as] giv[ing] up swimming more quickly in a forced swim test and stop[ping] sipping sugar water that they normally find attractive. Both behaviors can be reversed with antidepressants.”

One wrinkle in the research is that particulates often come in a package of various pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, and it is hard to untangle which specific pollutant is to blame. Many researchers try to study the relationship between psychological problems and one specific pollutant, and their findings of a correlation vary.

“All pollutants come at us in complex combinations, and sorting out the influence of the combinations is problematic,” says Colleen Moore, chair of the psychology department at Montana State University and author of Silent Scourge: Children, Pollution, and Why Scientists Disagree. “I always thought that the air pollution research should have just used the numerical values of the EPA Air Quality Index and not tried to go into details on the particular pollutants. If you look at it that way, there are effects on mental health that are pretty clear.” (Further complicating matters, Moore has found that noise pollution can also cause psychological distress, and Beijing certainly has plenty of that, thanks to its manic traffic and constant construction.)