Short-term exposure to traffic-related air pollution and dynamic brain connectivity in adolescents

DOI

There is some evidence which suggests short-term effects of traffic-related air pollution on brain function in adults. We aimed to examine these associations at ages 10 and 14 years using dynamic functional brain connectivity. We included participants from a population-based birth cohort with brain connectivity and air pollution data at home (n=3608) or school (n=2305) in at least one visit. We used land use regression models to estimate levels of air pollutants, including nitrogen oxides (NOX) and particulate matter (PM), during the week before the outcome measurement. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data, we generated five connectivity patterns. We calculated the mean time spent in each pattern for each participant and visit. We performed linear mixed effects models adjusted for relevant confounders. The median levels of NOX at the two visits and at home and school were between 36 and 47 μg/m3 and the median levels of PM2.5 were between 11 and 12 μg/m3. We found a weak association between higher air pollution exposure and less time spent in a low modularized connectivity pattern (e.g. coefficient=-0.031 [95% confidence interval=-0.056; -0.006] per 20 μg/m3 increase in NOX at home). However, this association did not remain after multiple testing correction. Further research that explores these associations at other exposure levels and other age periods is warranted.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34810/data2403
Related Identifier IsCitedBy https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2025.101574
Metadata Access https://dataverse.csuc.cat/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34810/data2403
Provenance
Creator Mónica López-Vicente ORCID logo; Michelle Kusters ORCID logo; Sami Petricola ORCID logo; Henning Tiemeier ORCID logo; Ryan L. Muetzel ORCID logo; Mònica Guxens ORCID logo
Publisher CORA.Repositori de Dades de Recerca
Contributor UBIOESGD
Publication Year 2025
Rights CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
OpenAccess true
Contact UBIOESGD (Barcelona Institute for Global Health)
Representation
Resource Type Aggregate data; Dataset
Format type/x-r-syntax; application/pdf; text/plain; text/tab-separated-values; application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size 44736; 38212; 17686; 12102; 26909; 24577; 9470; 3003373; 1989; 7235; 5010; 729089
Version 2.0
Discipline Life Sciences; Medicine