Air Pollution Can Damage Your Memory, Say Researchers

Causing around 7 million deaths every year, air pollution is the leading cause of serious diseases like lung inflammation, asthma, and even cancer. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 80% of the urban population breathes polluted air that exceeds the WHO limits.

The new research finds that breathing polluted air can age human memory by a decade. Researchers from the University of Warwick have found that people who lived in certain parts of England that contain high levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and air particulates (PM10) had significantly worse memory. They also discovered that there is a difference of 10 years of age in the memory of people living in England’s cleanest areas and that of the most polluted places.

About 34,000 randomly-sampled English citizens were examined from across England’s local-authority districts. They were all asked to remember age words in a standardized word-recall test. The analysis was adjusted for several other influences on the quality of their memory such as their health, age, education, ethnicity, and family & employment statuses. Their findings revealed a strong association between air pollution and impaired memory. The report will be published in the journal Ecological Economics.

As we grow older, our memory slowly starts worsening. The researchers opine that the difference in memory quality between England’s cleanest places (like Devon and West Somerset) and the most-polluted regions (like Kensington and Islington) is equivalent to the memory loss from ten University years of aging.

“There is a little prior evidence of a negative association between levels of traffic pollution and memory using data on elderly individuals and in children,” said the study’s lead author and Professor of Behavioral Science at Warwick Business School, Nattavudh Powdthavee, "but almost all research in human studies on this topic has been based on elementary correlations and not on nationally representative samples of individuals in a country. We have tried to solve these two problems in our study."

And the co-author Professor Andrew Oswald said that a 50-year-old person living in polluted Chelsea performs like a 60-year-old living in Plymouth when it comes to remembering a string of words. It is still unclear about how nitrogen dioxide and air particulates contribute to this, he added.