Environmental pollution is associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorders in the US and Denmark

Khan, Atif and Plana-Ripoll, Oleguer and Antonsen, Sussie and Brandt, Jørgen and Geels, Camilla and Landecker, Hannah and Sullivan, Patrick F. and Pedersen, Carsten Bøcker and Rzhetsky, Andrey and Ioannidis, John P. A. (2019) Environmental pollution is associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorders in the US and Denmark. PLOS Biology, 17 (8). e3000353. ISSN 1545-7885

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Abstract

The search for the genetic factors underlying complex neuropsychiatric disorders has proceeded apace in the past decade. Despite some advances in identifying genetic variants associated with psychiatric disorders, most variants have small individual contributions to risk. By contrast, disease risk increase appears to be less subtle for disease-predisposing environmental insults. In this study, we sought to identify associations between environmental pollution and risk of neuropsychiatric disorders. We present exploratory analyses of 2 independent, very large datasets: 151 million unique individuals, represented in a United States insurance claims dataset, and 1.4 million unique individuals documented in Danish national treatment registers. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) county-level environmental quality indices (EQIs) in the US and individual-level exposure to air pollution in Denmark were used to assess the association between pollution exposure and the risk of neuropsychiatric disorders. These results show that air pollution is significantly associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorders. We hypothesize that pollutants affect the human brain via neuroinflammatory pathways that have also been shown to cause depression-like phenotypes in animal studies.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: Science Global Plos > Biological Science
Depositing User: Unnamed user with email support@science.globalplos.com
Date Deposited: 16 Jan 2023 11:49
Last Modified: 25 Sep 2023 05:31
URI: http://ebooks.manu2sent.com/id/eprint/25

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