type of dementia <\/a>after Alzheimer\u2019s, researchers analysed hospital records from 56.5 million Americans from 2000 through 2014. They found that people living in areas with higher levels of PM2.5 were more likely to be hospitalised with two diseases marked by toxic clumps known as Lewy bodies: dementia with Lewy bodies and Parkinson\u2019s disease dementia.<\/p>\nThen the researchers went looking for what might explain the connection.<\/p>\n
In experiments in mice, exposure to pollution triggered the abnormal folding and build-up of alpha-synuclein, a protein that forms Lewy bodies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is something we were so surprised to see,\u201d said author Xiaobo Mao, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins and who will begin a new job in January as the director of the Houston Methodist Center for Translational Precision Dementia Research.<\/p>\n
The exposed mice also developed brain shrinkage, nerve-cell death and cognitive decline. But when researchers exposed mice genetically engineered without alpha-synuclein to the same pollution, most of that damage largely disappeared, suggesting the abnormal protein played a key role. That makes the pathway a potential target for future therapies.<\/p>\n
The findings, published in 2025 in Science, could also help solve a long-standing mystery about Lewy body dementia. Most people who develop the disease have no family history of it, leading scientists to suspect that environmental exposures may play an important role.<\/p>\n
How a pollution scientist protects himself<\/p>\n
Mao\u2019s interest in air pollution began around the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when the city\u2019s notoriously dirty air had become an international concern. Chinese officials were counting \u201cblue-sky days,\u201d restricting driving based on licence-plate numbers and temporarily shutting factories in an effort to clear the haze.<\/p>\n
Mao was studying nanoparticles at the time \u2013 particles so tiny they are measured in billionths of a metre \u2013 and began wondering what all that material in the air might be doing inside the body.<\/p>\n
He now lives in the United States, but decades of studying pollution have shaped how he thinks about the air he breathes every day. His precautions are mostly ordinary ones.<\/p>\n
He pays attention to indoor air as much as outdoor pollution. Cooking, especially without adequate ventilation, can generate surprisingly high concentrations of particles. \u201cIndoor cooking may sometimes be worse than anything else,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He would avoid living directly on a major road, where traffic-related pollution tends to be higher. At home, he changes his HVAC filters regularly. Then there are the basics: he eats a balanced diet, exercises and gets outside in the sunshine.<\/p>\n
Mao said we can\u2019t control everything that enters the air around us. But he works to control what he can. \u201cThat kind of prevention can go a long way,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Exactly how the particles get there remains unsettled. They are tracing how particles may travel into the brain…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":646746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[68,665,1558,1596,124,799,539,11521,134,221,316963,185,7055,2190,117,111,139,69,1118,65190,1319,4987,2202,92494,9433,223,3040,14905,102,9857],"class_list":["post-646745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-air","tag-around","tag-been","tag-brain","tag-could","tag-dementia","tag-emerging","tag-harm","tag-health","tag-how","tag-indirectly","tag-is","tag-linked","tag-long","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-physically","tag-picture","tag-pollution","tag-remarkable","tag-reshaping","tag-scientists","tag-the","tag-us","tag-whether","tag-with","tag-wonder"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}