Recently, a research team at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health led a study to discover how children’s exposure to air pollution affects the connectivity of certain networks in their brains. The team collected data from 3,626 children from the Generation R cohort in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In that area, there is particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10) as well as nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOX). To quote Michelle Kusters, the first author of this study, “this is one of the first studies to explore how air pollution affects brain connections at rest, using brain scans taken multiple times in a large group of children from birth.” The study focused on how air pollution affects specifically the functional connectivity between cortical and subcortical brain networks. These networks are crucial to a person’s perception, cognition, and action.
The researchers evaluated the children at around the ages of 10 and 14, and they analyzed their exposure to air pollution from when a child was born to when they were three years old as well as in the year prior to the evaluation. In order to assess the brains of the children, the research team used resting state neuroimaging. Resting state neuroimaging is the act of examining the fluctuations in brain activity when the patients are consious but not engaging in an active task.
The research team discovered that greater exposure to air pollution from birth to the age of three tended to lead to a weaker connection between the amygdala—which processes emotions and causes what is known as the “fight-or-flight” response—and the cortical networks associated with the ability to pay attention as well as somatomotor function, the system responsible for voluntary movements of the body, and auditory function. These findings have shown that pollution exposure could be detrimental for the normal development of brain networks.
In addition, the same team examined how exposures to air pollution could change brain volume throughout adolescence. They collected data from 4,243 children from the same Generation R cohort, and this time they also studied the children’s exposure to pollution during pregnancy as well as childhood. The researchers assessed white matter, cortical gray matter, the cerebellum, and seven subcortical volumes in this large group of children. White matter is a tissue in the brain that facilitates communication, nerves, memory, and coordination. Cortical gray matter is the outermost layer of the brain that surrounds the cerebrum and is responsible for thinking, memory, and sensory processing. The cerebellum is a part of the brain that is crucial to cognitive and motor functions. Their studies resulted in the discovery that exposure to air pollution during pregnancy led to a smaller hippocampus, which is crucial for memory function. But, they also found that as the children got older, the brain tended to counteract the negative effects of the exposure by growing the hippocampus.
This article was intriguing to me because I am very interested in the ongoing climate crisis and how it directly affects us. Growing up in the city, I face the problem of air pollution quite often. Whenever I get out of the city, I always wonder at the amount of stars visible in the sky because I never saw any where I grew up. The study really drove home the fact that air pollution negatively impacts the development of younger generations and I think that the deeper that researchers study this, the more likely it will empower more people to take action against global warming and to reduce pollution.
Article: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250401131319.htm
