The morning commute is already difficult and exhausting for many individuals. And now there’s another excuse to detest your regular travel to work or school as scientists found that even temporary exposure to diesel fumes from cars and other vehicles could hurt the human brain.
In a randomized controlled crossover study published within the journal Environmental Health, researchers analyzed how a temporary diesel exhaust exposure could acutely impair functional brain connectivity.
The concept traffic-related air pollution takes a toll on human health just isn’t latest. But for his or her study, the team focused on whether diesel fumes inhibited the human brain from functioning properly. They analyzed the brains of 25 adults via magnetic resonance imaging to find out the consequences of polluted air.
After examining the scans and studying the participants’ “functional connectivity” after contact, they found that exposure to diesel fumes “yielded a decrease in functional connectivity” in comparison with clean filtered air.
Though the scientists noted that they only analyzed the short-term effects of diesel exhaust, they said the effect of the fume on the brain could possibly be “detrimental” to human health in the long term.
“We observed short-term pollution-attributable decrements in default mode network functional connectivity. Decrements in brain connectivity causes many detrimental effects to the human body so this finding should guide policy change in air pollution exposure regulation,” the team concluded.
An identical study from researchers on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published in Management Science looked into how poor air quality affects the cognitive function of chess players.
The team found that even expert chess players performed worse when subjected to poor air quality, suggesting that pollution particles within the air negatively affect cognitive function.
“We discover that when individuals are exposed to higher levels of air pollution, they make increasingly more mistakes, they usually make larger mistakes,” co-author Juan Palacios, an economist in MIT’s Sustainable Urbanization Lab, explained in a press release.
“There are increasingly more papers showing that there’s a cost with air pollution, and there’s a value for increasingly more people. And this is only one example showing that even for these very [excellent] chess players, who think they will beat the whole lot—well, it appears that evidently with air pollution, they’ve an enemy who harms them,” he added.