Air Pollution Causes Heart Disease
Reported December 21, 2005
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — New research out of New York University School of Medicine reveals air pollution causes heart disease.
“We established a causal link between air pollution and atherosclerosis,” says Lung Chi Chen, Ph.D., associate professor of environmental medicine at NYU School of Medicine and a lead author of the new study. Atherosclerosis — the hardening, narrowing and clogging of the arteries — is an important component of cardiovascular disease.
In collaboration with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, researchers divided mice predisposed to cardiovascular disease into two feeding groups — one eating normal foods and the other eating high-fat foods. For the next six months, half of the mice in each feeding group breathed doses of either particle-free filtered air or air as equally polluted as the air in New York, which has been approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Researchers then conducted test on the mice to determine if the polluted air had any impact on cardiovascular health. They found mice that breathed polluted air fared worse than those inhaling filtered air. When coupled with a high-fat diet, the polluted air was even more damaging to cardiovascular health. Previous studies link air pollution to cardiovascular disease but until now, it was poorly understood how pollution damaged the body’s blood vessels.
Chen suspects PM2.5 exposure, the main pollutant in the air in both the study and in New York, could also greatly affect even people who do not eat high-fat diets.
Though findings for increased plaque among mice eating normal diets were not statistically significant, Chen believes future research on larger numbers of animals will solidify the trend. “Even with the low-fat diet, there’s still something there. So that is something to think about,” he says.
SOURCE: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 2005;294:3003-3009
