Will Pollution Make You Stupid?

Who knew that living in high levels of pollution will make your brain age quicker?

Poker winners, listen up. By now, you must have gotten used to being the best in UK poker rooms, but I’m here to warn you: if you live in highly polluted areas, your glory days might not last as long as you may think. The initial experiment has been published in The Annals of Neurology.

As reported in The New York Times, the target group consisted of 1,403 women without dementia. The first couple of studies happened in 1996 to 1998, then the subjects’ brain volume was measured by M.R.I. again, in 2005 and 2006. However, other factors had to be taken into measure, too.

Results had to be adapted to other elements

In order to get more accurate results, other pieces of information on patients had to be adjusted, according to The New York Times. Among these factors was smoking, age, income, weight etc. The results for brain ageing were quite conclusive… so if you want to be a star of mobile casinos, you had better watch out.

The outcome of the study was the following: when subjects’ air pollution exposure increased cumulatively by 3.49 micrograms per cubic centimeter, a decrease of 6.23 micrograms per cubic centimeter was observed in the participants’ white matter. Run to the hills, gamblers!