Poor air quality in India may be impairing cognitive abilities of infants under the age of two, a team of researchers has said after studying the home air quality of a group of rural families from a range of socio-economic backgrounds in Shivgarh, a rural community in Uttar Pradesh in India. One of the most populated states in the country, Uttar Pradesh is home to many highly polluted cities like Lucknow and Kanpur.
In collaboration with the Community Empowerment Lab in Lucknow, India – a global health research and innovation organization, the researchers assessed the visual working memory and visual processing speed of 215 infants using a specially-designed cognition task from October 2017 to June 2019. Cognition is the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. “The negative impact on children’s long-term brain development could have consequences for life,” the researchers said, emphasizing on global efforts to improve air quality so that infants’ emerging cognitive abilities can be boosted.
“This, in turn, could have a cascade of positive impacts because improved cognition can lead to improved economic productivity in the long term and reduce the burden on healthcare and mental health systems,” said lead researcher Professor John Spencer, from the University of East Anglia, UK. “Very small particulate fragments in the air are a major concern as they can move from the respiratory tract into the brain,” Spencer said. Until now, studies have failed to show a link between poor air quality and cognitive problems in babies, when brain growth is at its peak and the brain may be particularly sensitive to toxins.
On one display, the toddlers were shown flashing coloured squares that were always the same after each ‘blink’. On a second display, one coloured square changed after each blink. “This task capitalises on infant’s tendency to look away from something that’s visually familiar and towards something new,” Spencer said, adding that they were interested to know whether infants could detect the changing side and how well they did as we made the task harder by including more squares on each display.”
The team used air quality monitors in the children’s homes to measure emission levels and air quality. They also took into account and controlled for family socio-economic status.
“Such impacts could carry forward across years, negatively impacting long-term development,” he added.
The researchers also found that air quality was poorer in homes that used solid cooking materials like cow dung cake. Therefore, efforts to reduce cooking emissions in homes should be a key target for intervention, they said. The study is published in the journal eLife.