Road pollution can cause dementia? Scientists say yes!

(Image for representational purposes only)

New Delhi: It is common knowledge that pollution affects our health in more ways than one and causes all sorts of diseases. Car pollution is one of them.

The obvious health effects of car pollution is coughing, wheezing and other respiratory problems. But now, scientists have revealed a health effect of car pollution that no one would have thought of – Dementia.

Surprised? Well, if a new study is to be believed, people residing near a major road are nearly 12 percent more likely to develop dementia—a group of memory-loss disorders including Alzheimer's disease—than those who live further away.

Scientists at Public Health Ontario, who led the study, discovered that the closer residents lived to a major road and the longer they lived there, increased their risk of dementia.

The scientists came to this conclusion after tracking all the adults living in Ontario, Canada—about 6.6 million people—over the course of a decade from 2001 to 2012.

Using postal codes and medical records, they determined how close a given resident lived to a major road—including freeways, highways, or congested roads with two or more lanes—and if they went on to develop dementia, a report in Mother Jones said.

Residents living within 50 meters (55 yards) of a major road were between 7 to 12 percent more likely to develop dementia, depending on the duration they had spent there. The fact that they lived in an urban or a rural area also affected the results.

The risk dissipated until, 200 meters away from a major road, residents were at no more risk than those who lived further away, the report said.

Alarming numbers reveal that nearly half of adults in Ontario lived within 200 meters (219 yards) of a major roadway, and Copes estimates similar numbers for the United States.

"The challenge is to look at different ways of laying out of communities so that we have a higher percentage of our population who are located or residing more than 200 meters away from major traffic arteries," says Ray Copes, the director of environmental and occupational health at Public Health Ontario and a co-author on the Lancet study. That could mean building new homes, schools, and hospitals farther from major roads, or planning cities with more dispersed traffic, as per Mother Jones.

The end goal, according to Copes: create "a greater degree of separation between traffic and noses."