‘Exposure to air pollution impacts increase risks of mental health’

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A new study has shown that daily exposure to air pollution increases longer-term risk for adverse mental health outcomes such as anxiety and depression with substantial differences between individuals.

The model published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, known as Affective Sensitivity to Air Pollution (ASAP), describes the extent to which the level of psychological activation, or mood, fluctuates per daily changes in air pollution and the impact can vary between individuals.

Michelle Ng and colleagues from Stanford University introduced the ASAP construct and illustrated its measurement. They’re building on known associations between air pollution exposure, adverse mental health outcomes with statistical models and intensive repeated measures data obtained from 150 individuals for more than a year.

The researchers employed the models to examine whether and how individuals’ daily affective states fluctuate with the daily concentrations of outdoor air pollution in their county and they looked at two components of individuals’ affective state: arousal, the level of physiological activation, and valence, the positivity or negativity of their mood.

The work demonstrated the viability of using air pollution data obtained from local air quality monitors alongside psychological data to assess individuals’ ASAP and found that individuals’ affect arousal was lower than usual on days with higher than usual air pollution.

The findings also noted that individuals’ day-to-day psychological activation may be disrupted by air pollution with important implications as sensitivity to climate hazards is a central component of their vulnerability to climate change.

The authors emphasised that ASAP can be leveraged to better integrate the level of psychological activation and mental health in climate adaptation planning, vulnerability assessments and design personalized interventions to support individuals in the context of air pollution exposure.

The World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that 90 per cent of the world’s population breathes air that does not meet its standards for livable air quality.

“We propose a person-specific construct called ‘affective sensitivity to air pollution’ based on our finding that individuals differ significantly in how their affective states fluctuate in accordance with their daily exposures to air pollution,” the authors said.

They concluded that as climate change threatens human health and wellbeing worldwide, the need to integrate mental health in climate adaptation policies, plans, and programmes has never been more vital and the new construct contributes to discourse around the conceptualisation and measurement of individuals’ climate vulnerability.