City living and psychotic experiences: exploring the role of air pollution

[Mike 03]

Excerpts:

Understanding the impact of city living on mental health has never been more important. By 2050, 70% of the world's population will live in towns, cities, and megacities like London, New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Growing evidence links urban living to psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. A child born and raised in an urban (versus rural) setting is roughly twice as likely to develop a psychotic disorder in adulthood. But what drives this association? There is a growing interest in the potential role of air pollution. Air pollution is a pervasive environmental health problem and is nowadays mostly produced by manmade combustion from industry, transport, and domestic activity. Air pollution is therefore particularly problematic in cities.

To understand the relationship between cities and psychosis further, we examined the link between air pollution and sub-clinical psychotic experiences in teenagers in the UK. Psychotic experiences include phenomena such as hearing voices that others cannot hear, intense feelings of paranoia, and other unusual experiences such as believing that your thoughts are being read by someone - which are often referred to as hallucinations and delusions. These experiences are surprisingly common among young people in the general population and are usually transitory. However, early psychotic experiences can signal risk for later mental health problems including psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. We investigated whether psychotic experiences are more common among teenagers exposed to higher levels of air pollution and whether air pollution levels might explain the link between living in a city and having psychotic experiences.

...

We found that teenagers living in cities were more likely to report psychotic experiences than those living in towns and villages. Not surprisingly, air pollution levels were highest in the cities.

Second, teenagers exposed to higher levels of air pollution were more likely to report psychotic experiences than those living in areas with lower levels of pollution, even after taking into account growing up in a poor family or unpleasant neighbourhood, having a family member with mental health problems, and whether the teenager smoked or did other drugs.

More at link:

https://www.thesciencebreaker.com/breaks/health-physiology/city-living-and-psychotic-experiences-exploring-the-role-of-air-pollution

Interesting and frightening article. It does suggest a theory about how pollutants (especially those emitted by slow-moving vehicular traffic) might damage a developing brain. More studies are linking airborne pollution to serious illness, including dementia and alzheimer's.

EDIT to include link! Sorry!