Long-term exposure to air pollution impacts activity in brain regions involved in inhibitory control in 10 to 13- year old children
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Background
The development of inhibitory control, a core component of cognitive control, can be influenced by environmental factors. We investigated whether exposure to particulate matter with diameter ≤ 10 μm (PM 10 ) and nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) across different life-time periods is related to the neural correlates of inhibitory control in 10-to 13-year-old children from southern Poland.
Methods
Task functional magnetic resonance imaging (task fMRI) measures brain activity while participants perform specific cognitive or behavioral tasks. We investigated inhibition using a Go/NoGo task during task fMRI and tested associations between neural correlates of inhibitory control and exposure to air pollution during prenatal, early-life, and current life periods. The study population comprised children from the NeuroSmog study with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD, n=143) and their typically developing peers (n = 385).
Results
Higher current exposure to PM 10 was significantly associated with reduced brain activation during response inhibition in key cognitive control networks, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. We did not observe significant interactions between our participants’ ADHD diagnosis and their exposure to air pollution.
Conclusions
Long-term exposure to air pollution was associated with impairments in brain function related to inhibition in both ADHD children and their typically developing peers. Our findings add novel, pertinent evidence to the growing body of research indicating that air pollution negatively impacts the development of executive function in children and suggests that the same mechanisms that underlie pollution’s effects on the brain may also lead to the increased incidence of ADHD.
