study<\/a>, published in the journal, Respiratory Research, suggests that wildfire smoke does more than irritate your lungs \u2014 it can also affect your mood and mental well\u2011being.<\/p>\nThe study consisted of 747 participants in Albuquerque, NM. Each was asked to complete a mental health status questionnaire over a period of 60 days after exposure to wildfire smoke.<\/p>\n
Shuguang Leng, MBBS, PhD is an epidemiologist, associate professor of medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of New Mexico and co-author of the study. He said even exposures of a few days can lead to temporary bouts of depression.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s quite surprising to actually see, despite our smoke, especially this acute exposure, is associated with the changing of some mental health,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Dr. Leng anticipated the lung-related effects but was quite surprised to see measurable changes in mental health outcomes as well.<\/p>\n
Mental health responds on a different time scale than physical health said Dr. Leng.<\/p>\n
This suggests mental health impacts are more immediate and short-lived (at least in this dataset), compared to the more delayed and cumulative effects on physical health.<\/p>\n
Dr. Leng referenced a separate study using animal models and found similar results.<\/p>\n
Smoke exposure levels can be \u201cmodest\u201d but still matter, Leng said.<\/p>\n
This field of study is emerging, and acute mental health effects are nder-studied, Leng said.There are some studies linking chronic air pollution or wildfire smoke to cognitive impairment and dementia-like outcomes. But \u201cfor acute impact, there are very minimal findings so far.<\/p>\n
Leng continues his research looking for cohorts with both smoke exposure data and stored blood samples so they can identify biomarkers in blood that may be triggered by wildfire smoke.<\/p>\n
Officials have issued early warnings ahead of what could be an active wildfire season this spring and summer.<\/p>\n
Leng encourages people in the path of wildfire smoke to heed any warnings to wear masks or stay indoors. He suggested the web site airnow.com<\/a> for people following wildfire smoke alerts in their communities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New research has linked moderate levels of wildfire smoke in the air to changes in people\u2019s mental health.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":520623,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[49,48,84],"class_list":{"0":"post-520622","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/520623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}