Avoid Air Pollution

Alzheimer's, cardiovascular, and other chronic diseases; biomarkers, lifestyle, supplements, drugs, and health care.
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pal
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Avoid Air Pollution

Post by pal »

http://www.curealz.org/2013/04/exposure ... 9s-disease

"The study, led by Cure Alzheimer’s Research Consortium member Sam Gandy, M.D., Ph.D., of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, examined how elements in air pollution such as nickel nanoparticles affect the levels of certain peptides in the brain that are found to be at heightened levels in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease.

“We don’t yet completely understand why the peptides accumulate, but we do know the genes responding to the peptides play an important role in developing Alzheimer’s,” said Gandy.

To test the correlation, mice were examined 24 hours after being exposed to air pollution where they showed a 72-129 percent increase in levels of the peptides.

“We were startled when three hours of air pollution exposure for the mice showed such a rapid and dramatic elevation,” said Gandy.

While the study links air pollution to Alzheimer’s, Gandy emphasized that more research is needed to better understand the role of genetics saying, “There is probably some interaction between genetic susceptibility to air pollution that mitigates the response to the exposure.”

Additionally, the study emphasized the need to better understand air pollution’s effects on humans in a natural setting.

“We suspect that humans will have an even more dramatic reaction to air pollution than mice because the human molecule is far stickier, making it highly prone to clumping and accumulation,” said Gandy. This could mean an even stronger link between air pollution and Alzheimer’s than is reflected in the study’s findings.

Interest in linking air pollution exposure to Alzheimer’s disease started when studies showed young people living in highly polluted cities [e.g., Mexico City] to have Alzheimer's disease pathology, and because of existing evidence linking air pollution to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

“We wanted to see if we could better explain why so many people were showing signs of Alzheimer’s at such a young age,” Gandy said. “The results of this study clearly show an urgent need to better understand this link.”

Read the published paper here: http://f1000research.com/articles/1-70/v1
Read a 4/9/13 publication from Annals of Internal Medicine linking air pollution to cognition here:
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/suppo ... /index.cfm

(Emphasis and comment in brackets added.)
pal
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Re: Avoid Air Pollution

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Mexico City study:
http://tpx.sagepub.com/content/32/6/650.long

News article re studies:
http://www.kjrh.com/news/studies-air-po ... ain-damage
"Scientists in 2004 studied the brain tissue of children and young adults in Mexico who had died of accidents and were stunned by what they found -- a discovery that rocked the world of neuroscience and has gone largely untested until now.

Almost all the young people had evidence of Alzheimer's protein plaques scattered throughout their brain tissue.

The only factor linking one case to another was air pollution in Mexico City, which led scientists at the time to hypothesize that smog might be a trigger of Alzheimer's disease and that the mind-robbing damage might start early in life.

Now a new group of scientists has picked up where the first team left off. So far, it appears a link may exist between inhaling pollutants and developing damage in the brain.

A nationwide study last year followed the fate of nearly 20,000 women over a 10-year period and found that inhaling pollutants, such as those found in any metropolitan area, exacerbated problems with attention span and escalated memory loss.

Another investigation reported last year, which focused on Boston, revealed that on days when concentrations of traffic-related pollutants were up, the number of strokes increased.M

Dr. Heather Volk of the University of Southern California reported last fall that exposure to traffic-related pollution during pregnancy and a child's first year of life appear to be associated with an elevated risk of autism.

The key pollutants, she found, were vehicle-related particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, a leading precursor of ozone, also known as smog.

In Manhattan, Dr. Sam Gandy, director of the Center for Cognitive Health at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City has begun a series of studies testing whether air pollution can trigger the pathological changes linked to Alzheimer's.

His research, which was inspired by the findings in Mexico, focuses on laboratory animals.

Gandy said few studies have examined air pollutants as a possible cause. And while the epidemiologic study of Mexican children and young adults suggested the possibility, that evidence was circumstantial. "You rarely see this kind of pathology before the age of 40 and never, ever in children," Gandy said.

The 2004 autopsy research raised key questions for Gandy, primarily when and how Alzheimer's begins in the brain and which pollutants in contaminated air are so capable of unraveling the mind.

In the original study in Mexico, Dr. Lilian Calderon-Garciduenas of the University of Montana examined 43 brains from children and young adults, the oldest of whom was 40. Half of the specimens were from children younger than 17.

Of those studied, 35 were lifelong residents of Mexico City while the eight control subjects, people who lived outside the air pollution of Mexico City, were from the rural areas of Tlaxcala and Veracruz.

Calderon-Garciduenas and her team looked for changes in genes and immune-system markers. They also searched for physical evidence indicative of Alzheimer's disease and found it in residents of Mexico City -- but not in the tissue of people of the same age from unpolluted rural areas.

In the lab, Gandy and colleagues exposed mice to the common gases and nanoparticles of air pollution for three hours. When the mice were autopsied, they showed a 72 percent to 129 percent increase in the levels of beta amyloid, a key protein associated with Alzheimer's. "We were startled when three hours of air pollution exposure for the mice showed such a rapid and dramatic elevation," Gandy said.

Dr. Jeremy Koppel, a research scientist at the Litwin-Zucker Research Center for the Study Alzheimer's disease and Memory Disorders in Manhasset, N.Y., called the findings exciting. "What is interesting about this study is that it followed the epidemiological research," said Koppel, referring to the order of studies. Koppel was not involved in either investigation.

What's still missing, added Koppel, is whether pollution somehow influences "tau," another aberrant protein linked to Alzheimer's disease.

Gandy said he hopes to further test his hypothesis. "The air we breathe affects our entire bodies," said Gandy, so it is not far-fetched to explore an effect on the brain."
pal
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Re: Avoid Air Pollution

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Julie G
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Re: Avoid Air Pollution

Post by Julie G »

GREAT info, as always, Pal. I appreciate learning about these overlooked factors that MAY end up being important contributors to the disease process. For those of us at very high risk, it helps to control what we can.

Tuesday's Facebook post? You rock :D Keep them coming!
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Re: Avoid Air Pollution

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it seems late in the day to be learning of this for me, but you probably should make sure that youngsters with ApoE4 should be given guidance of how to behave with regards to toxic chemicals and other cerebral insults.
pal
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Re: Avoid Air Pollution

Post by pal »

Julie: Sounds good. Glad it's helpful. Feel free to re-post any articles I find.

DoctorLost: Agreed it's important for the young ones, but can't hurt to avoid these pollutants even for us oldies.
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Re: Avoid Air Pollution

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I don't know if there is a better place to post this? CBS news had a football player from the 1970's and they were not sure if he had AD or CTE. Dr. Sam Gandy decided that it was CTE due to experimental pet scan to find tau tangles and they found the tau tangles.
circular
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Re: Avoid Indoor Air Pollution Too

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This article from Jan 2017 provides a nice overview of where things stand, although there may have been developments since then. I think air pollution is one of the biggest holes in many, probably most, of our brain protection roofs.

I threw some serious money at this issue this week because I live in a high traffic area with lots of road noise and pollution (although not a big city and not to where you can see the pollution). First I bought three Elgato Eve Room VOC monitors to spread around my 2000 sq ft home. These do not measure particulate matter though. I discovered rather dramatic and scary spikes in my indoor air quality on three consecutive days, and this when outdoor air quality by local monitors is exceptionally good.

When the spikes occurred I first tried to address them by using my big box store Honeywell true HEPA filters with VOC prefilters (they don't make huge claims about these pre-filters so I never expected much out of them). When that didn't bring the VOC levels down, I tried the whole house fan. When that didn't work I tried both. When that didn't work I opened up the windows on a couple beautiful days with good, outdoor air pollution monitor readings. That brought levels back into the excellent zone. But, a problem is that much of the year weather doesn't favor opening lots of windows and airing the house out, and based on my readings I would need to do this multiple times a day. Another problem is that opening windows lets VOCs out and fine particulate matter in.

I came to a crossroads where I felt that I had no choice but to buy the best air purifier I know of at great expense to help plug this hole in my roof, so I finally sprung for the IQ Air HealthPro Plus to try to keep my home's air clean. (I don't know or work for them. It was discussed in our chronic inflammation/CIRS thread.)

Meanwhile I learned of another home air monitor that will be available in the US in a couple months, the LaserEgg 2+. Like the Elgato Eve Room this one measures VOCs, temperature and relative humidity, but it also measures particulate matter. There are other home monitors that do this, but I want my carefully selected smart home gadgets (currently this also includes Hue bulbs for low/no blue light in the evenings and other lighting tweaks) to work with Apple HomeKit, which is more secure than other smart home protocols. Right now LaserEgg is the only AppleKit compatible air quality monitor measuring particulates. I'm going to return the Elgato Rooms and then see if the IQ Air is quiet enough to run all the time, such that maybe I don't need to pay for the monitors, at least not for a while. But if the IQ Air isn't needed all the time, a good smart home air monitor will allow me to set a rule to turn on the IQ Air when readings are nearing an unsafe level (using a smart plug for the IQ Air) and turn it back off again when a safe level registers.
IMG_5965.PNG
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Edit: These spikes weren’t detectable without a monitor. The air looked, felt and smelled clean and healthy.

Humidity is also part of our indoor air quality. I live in a dry climate, so I don't need to track humidity for overall mold deterrence, but this is a real help for those at risk for mold illness living in humid or borderline areas. If the monitor shows mold-favorable conditions it can trigger a dehumidifier to address it. Likewise it can turn that off at the right point to prevent the air from being too dry for health. For me the air can get too dry, so I can use the same monitors to turn on a humidifier (instead of dehumidifier) when the air is too dry and to turn it off when it approaches the mold promoting level. I expect this will help with sleep in the bedroom, since when I wake up my nasal passages are often dry, and when I turn some humidity on my breathing improves.
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Last edited by circular on Mon Nov 20, 2017 7:25 am, edited 4 times in total.
ApoE 3/4 > Thanks in advance for any responses made to my posts.
circular
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Re: Avoid Indoor Air Pollution Too

Post by circular »

Another thing I plan to do - in time - is have a fan installed in my garage in an exterior wall to vent the exhaust-filled air out, so it won't come in the home when we go in and out of the garage. An air monitor could be placed in the garage and set in the smart home network to trigger the fan when the air quality in the garage is at a certain level, and turn it off at a safer level.
ApoE 3/4 > Thanks in advance for any responses made to my posts.
circular
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Re: Avoid Indoor Air Pollution Too

Post by circular »

This ongoing experiment is sure interesting.

Every morning the air quality in my master bath and bedroom undergoes rapid deterioration after I take a shower. Here's a typical images from that monitor.
After Showers.jpg
This one with two lines shows the day before when I used a run of the mill Honeywell true HEPA filter with pre-filter for VOCs to improve the air quality after the issue. The other line shows the next morning when I left it alone. So leaving particles aside which my monitors don't detect, this purifier did nothing but waste energy.
After Showers Purple with Honeywell.jpg
At first I theorized it might be the hair dryer doing this, but the next day I checked and it was happening before using the dryer. I then used the hair dryer in the guest bedroom that has a monitor and the effect was very small and still within 'good' air quality range. I have a chlorine filter on my showerhead, but I've since learned that there are other chemicals in the water that can combine with the heat and volatilize, so will be looking into that.
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ApoE 3/4 > Thanks in advance for any responses made to my posts.
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