Study Reveals Links Between UK Air Pollution and Mental Ill-Health 60
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Long-term exposure to even comparatively low levels of air pollution could cause depression and anxiety, according to a study exploring the links between air quality and mental ill-health. Tracking the incidence of depression and anxiety in almost 500,000 UK adults over 11 years, researchers found that those living in areas with higher pollution were more likely to suffer episodes, even when air quality was within official limits. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry, the researchers, from the universities of Oxford and Beijing and Imperial College London, said their findings suggested a need for stricter standards or regulations for air pollution control.
The researchers drew on the data of 389,185 participants from the UK Biobank, modeling and giving a score to the air pollution, including PM2.5 and PM10, nitrogen dioxide and nitric oxide for the areas in which they lived. They found 13,131 cases of depression and 15,835 of anxiety were identified among their sample within a follow-up period of about 11 years. As air pollution increased, the researchers found, so did cases of depression and anxiety. Exposure-response curves were non-linear, however, with steeper slopes at lower levels and plateauing trends at higher exposure, suggesting that long-term exposure to low levels of pollution were just just as likely to lead to diagnoses as exposure to higher levels. "Considering that many countries' air quality standards are still well above the latest World Health Organization global air quality guidelines 2021, stricter standards or regulations for air pollution control should be implemented in the future policy making," the researchers wrote.
The researchers drew on the data of 389,185 participants from the UK Biobank, modeling and giving a score to the air pollution, including PM2.5 and PM10, nitrogen dioxide and nitric oxide for the areas in which they lived. They found 13,131 cases of depression and 15,835 of anxiety were identified among their sample within a follow-up period of about 11 years. As air pollution increased, the researchers found, so did cases of depression and anxiety. Exposure-response curves were non-linear, however, with steeper slopes at lower levels and plateauing trends at higher exposure, suggesting that long-term exposure to low levels of pollution were just just as likely to lead to diagnoses as exposure to higher levels. "Considering that many countries' air quality standards are still well above the latest World Health Organization global air quality guidelines 2021, stricter standards or regulations for air pollution control should be implemented in the future policy making," the researchers wrote.
It Is Depressing Smelling The Sewer Plant (Score:1, Offtopic)
And living in England.
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Quite!
#TorySewageParty
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These days the worst of it is in places like London, due to vehicle pollution.
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Cities. People living in cities are more depressed.
My thought exactly. I'd like to know if they isolated their results for urban vs. rural. IMO, cities are depressing...too many/much people, traffic, crime, etc.
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Lets play a game.......How many other things can we correlate [...]
For example, unwanted news and people asking that question?
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I agree. I would like to see a control study where they found a city that had lowering air pollution during the same time period and expect to see a lowering of the symptoms. There are so many other factors that could have caused the increasing depression and anxiety that to say it is directly the result of pollution seems tenuous.
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> There are so many other factors that could have caused the increasing depression and anxiety
Right, there are many causes, no doubt about that.
Lower incidence of community services, health services, fresh food, parks, trees, and higher incidence of pollution, crowded schools, noise, etc.
All of those factors need attention individually. Moreover, larger driving factors, like cultural assumptions and public policy, need serious attention too.
Disregard the study (Score:1)
The researchers were mostly from the UK, therefore they may have been affected by the pollution and produced a flawed study. If they were not affected by the pollution and produced a good study, then how can their claim be true that UK air pollution causes mental ill health? Reductio ad absurdum.
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Don't you find it a bit suspicious that China, which has far more people, far more data on those people, and far more pollution, paid to have this research done somewhere else? Do you think it is likely that they will implement policies based on this research, or are they just hoping their competitors will?
Correlation and Causation (Score:1)
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It's extremely well documented that air pollution causes a variety of mental problems. This isn't correlation and causation it's just more data to add to what we already know. And so that we can ignore it like we keep doing because people really really love cars and nobody wants to spend a little extra money making factories zero emissions.
Private pla
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Could you at least read the fucking summary? They attracted over 11 years.
Poor people have lived in crappy areas for a lot longer than 11 years.
nobody wants to spend a little extra money making factories zero emissions.
Most air pollution doesn't come from factories.
There are also rapidly diminishing returns. A smokestack scrubber can remove 90% of pollution. Removing the next 9% may cost ten times as much. The last 1% may cost a hundred times as much.
At some point, it makes more sense to spend the money on something else, like better schools, wind turbines, or importing products from China so the pollution happens there instead.
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Could you at least read the fucking summary? They attracted over 11 years. The current shit storm in the UK started with the brexit referendum in 2016.
Brexit occurred within the timeframe of the study.
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Treating people like they treat rats in crowding studies has the same effect: anxiety and depression.
We've already shown urban living to be a cause - another cause isn't needed for science (though I suspect it's compounding).
What they do need is cherry-picked data for their "Fifteen Minute Cities" flavor of Global Communism, so here 'ya go.
And, yes, isolating factories downwind of living areas is ideal. Yet fixing the diet is much more cost effective and achievable quickly for a larger effect size.
And that
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Re:"We may have found a correlation" (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean we already know it contributes to cancer, asthma and now mental illness and god knows what else.
Yes it's correlation but eventually when you have pile upon pile of correlation you can safely draw a causation.
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Yes it's correlation but eventually when you have pile upon pile of correlation you can safely draw a causation.
Nonsense. You don't prove causation by "piling up" evidence of correlation. You prove causation by correcting for the correlation or by running a randomized controlled experiment.
One of the biggest misconceptions about statistics is that more data automatically leads to better results. The problem is rarely insufficient data. Sampling bias, survivorship bias, or bad math are more likely to cause problems.
In this case, instead of just looking at areas with "good air" and "bad air", where people living where
Re:"We may have found a correlation" (Score:4, Interesting)
Studies like this are hardly the only ones looking at air pollution though. Plenty of studies have exposed rats to air pollution and a control group to clean air and found similar physiological changes in the rats exposed to air pollution. It's harder to hand wave that away as just correlation.
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Yes it's correlation but eventually when you have pile upon pile of correlation you can safely draw a causation.
Nonsense. You don't prove causation by "piling up" evidence of correlation.
Thank you, Philip Morris.
You have completely misunderstood the method used to get the result. They were not 'just looking at areas with "good air" and "bad air"', they were looking at reported illness and then looking at the air quality where the people were from. Basically the exact opposite of what you said.
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Neither method would prove a causation relation.
And your 'Philip Morris' comment makes you sound like an incredibly dumb activist that has no conception of how scientific statistics work.
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Neither method would prove a causation relation.
And your 'Philip Morris' comment makes you sound like an incredibly dumb activist that has no conception of how scientific statistics work.
Dry up and fuck off, troll.
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Right, because everyone who disagrees with you is a troll...
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Such studies will cost money but will be way cheaper than spending billions on scrubbers which may have no benefit.
Sure, whatever you say [tumblr.com].
Re: "We may have found a correlation" (Score:2)
The mechanisms by which air pollution hurts you are not especially mysterious. You can for instance correlate air pollution to inflammation levels, and inflammation levels to all sorts of poor health outcomes. There are also well-established theories to the mechanism by which for instance benzopyrene, common component of PM 2.5 pollution, causes DNA damage. I for one would feel pretty depressed if I got lung cancer, so there's one causal pathway for you.
Correlation + plenty of reasonable causal pathways = c
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I for one would feel pretty depressed if I got lung cancer, so there's one causal pathway for you.
What a dumbfuck stupid remark.
If you go by that bullshit then all shitty things in life that you encounter are caused by just one thing: You being alive.
Correlation + plenty of reasonable causal pathways = causation. Pretty much.
Pretty much the biggest scientific bullshit i've seen...
To prove causation you have to exclude all the other factors first.
It's not enough to just show reasonable causality, you have to make reasonable that other pathways are not the cause.
Re: "We may have found a correlation" (Score:2)
The vast majority of things we correctly believe has not and can never be tested by RCTs, and you thinking that "correcting for other factors" would be the other option just reveals you haven't understood the first thing about causal inference.
No causality in, no causality out. It's impossible to draw causal conclusions from observational data alone, no matter how much you correct for things. You have to make causal assumptions, or you can never draw causal conclusions.
The causal assumptions you need to mak
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The causal assumptions you need to make to draw the concusion that air pollution affects mental health, should not be controversial.
So what are these causal assumptions that i need to make to draw the conclusion that air pollution affects mental health and which are not controversial?
Also, how do you know the effect (degrading mental health) you research is caused by an independent variable (air pollution) you claim is the cause without researching how other things contribute to the effect (stress, food pattern, drinking habits, etc, etc, etc) ?
The vast majority of things we correctly believe has not and can never be tested by RCTs
If you believe, then how can you know it is correct?
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Let's not jump to conclusions
https://twitter.com/drpascalme... [twitter.com]
Re: "We may have found a correlation" (Score:2)
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"therefore we urge policy makers to enact stricter rules!"
Whatever happened to the disinterested pursuit of truth?
I think you may have confused them with some sort of monk. Either that, or you don't really understand what disinterested means in this context. You can be disinterested and still give advice or make recommendations based on what you've learned.
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I think you replied to the wrong comment here. The comment of mine that you replied to did not say anything about correlation. That was in another thread.
Afro-Carribean decent and schizophrenia in the UK. (Score:1)
The rate of schizophrenia is much higher among Afro-Caribbean residents in the UK than other UK residents. However, this is believed to be due to environmental factors, not genetics.
Re:Afro-Carribean decent and schizophrenia in the (Score:4, Insightful)
The rate of schizophrenia is much higher among Afro-Caribbean residents in the UK than other UK residents.
In America, the rate for African-Americans is three times higher than for whites.
Men have significantly higher rates than women.
The countries of Southeast Asia have the highest rates.
Epidemiology of schizophrenia [wikipedia.org]
Sex differences in schizophrenia [wikipedia.org]
However, this is believed to be due to environmental factors, not genetics.
This "belief" is made for political reasons. It is not based on data.
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In America, the rate for African-Americans
The countries of Southeast Asia have the highest rates.
You are telling us that people in more polluted and poorer parts of the world have higher rates of schizophrenia? Two different races, cultures, diets, lifestyles. And that is not environmental, it's..?
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The countries of Southeast Asia have the highest rates.
You are telling us that people in more polluted and poorer parts of the world have higher rates of schizophrenia?
No. Southeast Asia is not very polluted and not very poor.
Singapore is, by far, the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia and one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Singapore's per capita GDP is higher than America's. Singapore also has stringent pollution controls. Yet it has the 7th highest schizophrenia rate in the world.
And that is not environmental
The environment may be a factor, but it does not explain the (very) wide disparities between ethnic groups.
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Singapore is pretty small. What about the other, much larger, SE Asian countries?
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Singapore is pretty small.
Singapore has 5 million people.
What about the other, much larger, SE Asian countries?
They have very wide variations in their development level and exposure to pollutants. Economically and developmentally, Myanmar is the polar opposite of Singapore. The only thing all the nations of Southeast Asia have in common is high rates of schizophrenia.
Go here and click on the map: Epidemiology of schizophrenia [wikipedia.org].
Smoking, drinking, cocaine. (Score:1)
The evidence on salt in food, processed meat snd air pollution( especially when treated as one thing, as here ) is not convincing.
More bad research, trying to prove a point and not uncover the truth, does not help convince me.
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You should publish a paper pointing out all the glaring holes you've found in their research, and thus contribute to science.
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Successive Tory Governments & Capitalsm (Score:1)
A study from the department of the fucking obvious.
Both of these things ( Air Pollution & Depression ) are symptoms of a neglectful conservative governments.
Air Pollution kills approximately 33000 people in the UK per year. Air pollution that could be avoided but our tory governments policies are those that INCREASE pollution and mame our planets ability to sequester it, not decrease it or rewiild areas of land
Thanks to our system facilitating the agenda of billionaires and the ruling class aka Tories
Me
hello captain obvious (Score:2)
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Unfortunately, residents of low-population, rural states like Wyoming and Montana also appear to be insane. In addition, many also suffer from low intelligence, a problem not as prevalent in the area you mention. This would suggest that there's more to the situation than simply living in an urban environment.
I don't see them controlling for location. (Score:2)
Also, they failed to disclose the conflict of interest presented by the fact that the CCP paid for this study, and they have a
In a related study (Score:2)
It was found that chess players made more mistakes and worse mistakes as a direct function of air pollution. The study group was reasonably large (around 120 or so players in total) and involved comparing actual moves against the results of one of the top chess AIs to determine which moves were mistakes and how severe those mistakes were. From what I understand, the study looked at multiple games between the same two people so that apples were compared with apples. (I forget exactly how many games were look