NAISS
SUPR
NAISS Projects
SUPR
Vertex wise analysis of pollutions effect on the brain
Dnr:

sens2025649

Type:

NAISS SENS

Principal Investigator:

Nicholas Judd

Affiliation:

Stockholms universitet

Start Date:

2025-09-29

End Date:

2026-10-01

Primary Classification:

50101: Psychology (Excluding Applied Psychology)

Allocation

Abstract

A major public health concern is the adverse effects of air pollution. Fundamental research suggests a plausible mechanistic link between greater pollution (e.g., PM2.5) and adverse health effects. However, most population-level research has used neighborhood pollution indicators. These are problematic, as they are heavily confounded with a myriad of other socioeconomic and individual-level characteristics. This confounding makes it virtually impossible to determine the causal impact of such pollution measures on health outcomes. Here, we leverage a unique source of air pollution to better estimate the true impact of air pollution: Wildfires. We constructed two wildfire-specific PM2.5 measures by pairing a wildfire pollution dataset with 9806 children from the Adolescent Brain Development Consortium; Perinatal exposure (PSE) reflects the first 12 months of life, including gestation, and childhood exposure (CSE) reflects lifetime exposure before the first imaging timepoint (~10 years of age). Using linear mixed effects modeling, we examine how PSE and CSE affect adolescent cognitive and neural development using 4 timepoints (10-16 yrs) as random slopes with imaging site and child as random intercepts.