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Inhalation Of Polluted Air Likely To Lower IQ |
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The researchers have found in a recent study that the kids who breath a lot of dirty air due to living close to the areas with heavy traffic pollution, are likely to have lower IQs compared to the other kids. They said that these kids also score worse on the other tests of intelligence and memory than the children who use to breathe the cleaner air. Though the researchers have studied the effect of pollution on the cardiovascular and respiratory health extensively in the past, they could find very less about how breathing dirty air might affect the brain.
With a view to find out this relation between breathing dirty air and the brain functioning, the American researchers have recently conducted a study where they examined a number of 202 children. All the children included in the study were within the age group of 8 to 11 years and they were also participating in a study of maternal smoking. During the study, the researchers related a number of measures of the cognitive function to the children`s estimated exposure to black carbon. The black carbon is known as a component of the particulate matter emitted in automobile and truck exhaust, particularly by diesel vehicles.
The researchers noticed that the scores of the children on several intelligence tests decreased proportionately with the increment of their exposure to black carbon. They said that when they adjusted for the effects of the other factors like the parents` education, language spoken at home, birth weight, and exposure to tobacco smoke, they found the association to remain the same. They gave an example that suggests that the heavy exposure to black carbon was linked to a 3-point drop in IQ, on an average. They also found the heavily exposed children to score lower on the tests of vocabulary, memory and learning in comparison to the other children.
They said that the effect of pollution on intelligence had similarity with that seen among the children, whose mothers did smoke at least 10 cigarettes per day while pregnant, or among those kids, who were exposed to lead. Thus, the researchers came to the conclusion that the exposure to traffic pollution is associated with many other harmful effects and the people have very less options to limit it. They said that the traffic pollution has the capability to exert harmful effects by causing inflammation and oxidative damage to the brain of the kids.
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