Air pollution a risk factor for diabetes | Hacker News Reader

Air pollution a risk factor for diabetes

healthsciencemag.org

41 pointsupen16 comments

Possibly related: regularly encountered concentrations of ultrafine particles (UFP) have been found to reduce or even eliminate exercise-induced release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) [1] [2], a response which is believed to play a key role in the neurological and psychological benefits of exercise. I suspect that this is just one branch of a larger causal web and that UFP or other correlated pollution may also be reducing some of the broader endocrine/metabolic benefits of exercise.

To the best of my knowledge, UFP levels are not routinely reported or regulated. I think this is because they pass through most filters. IIRC, some kind of multi-stage filter with a liquid medium has to be used to get an accurate count.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22867973

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21708224

I don't doubt you're right but I also worry that concern over each vector for bad air could easily make us neurotic.

Many problems of this sort (e.g. wood naturally contains formaldehyde) are likely solved using plant life.

So; the solution could be cheap and affordable. I realize this seems like homespun vaguely natural medicine (no chemicals!) advocacy but this is not that.

There's a nice NASA study on the subject in my comment below.

I really wish people would put more effort into differentiating which form of diabetes they were talking about, because they aren't all the same. Type 1 and type 2 are only superficially similar. And now Alzheimer's is being called diabetes type 3.

As a parent of a type 1, it's hugely frustrating to be reading an article on diabetes, only to discover they are talking about type 2 when I'm half way through it.

There's also a type 4 now as well, which appears to be another distinct age-related form of immune dysfunction that impacts insulin-related functionality.

http://www.salk.edu/news/salk-news/faq-on-type-4-diabetes/

The problem is that the name describes the symptom rather than etiology or mechanism. Perhaps a campaign to call them "pancreatic failure" and "Insulin resistance" would be worthwhile.

Perhaps it's time for a campaign to rename type 1 diabetes.

Monobetes?

Autobetes perhaps? One is autoimmune pancreatic insulin resistance (T1), one is self-induced pancreatic insulin resistance (T2), one is autoimmune or self-induced nervous system insulin resistance (Alz).

T1 isn't insulin resistance, T1 is no insulin production.

This seems like one of those not terribly relevant statements one can make for any environmental factor that correlates with lower life expectancy. Aging is damage, age-related disease is caused by damage, and thus people with shorter life expectancies have more damage and more age-related disease.

Air pollution is quite well correlated with lower life expectancy, though it is one of those factors, like wealth, intelligence, education, and social status, that are all entwined with one another and with observed variations in life expectancy. There are direct mechanisms whereby exposure to pollutants can cause harm, but it is also true that there is evidence for the genetics of intelligence to also provide greater physical robustness. There is no really good data to sort out which of the mix of many correlations is actually driving the observed relationships between air pollution and age-related disease, given that greater wealth means evading or lowering air pollution, and the true causes of the wealth-longevity relationship are obscure. Much the same could be said for any of the individual relationships in this web.

> Air pollution is quite well correlated with lower life expectancy, though it is one of those factors, like wealth, intelligence, education, and social status, that are all entwined with one another and with observed variations in life expectancy.

I'm not so sure about that actually, which surprises even me.

Outside, it is a problem of regulation and I won't touch that here.

Inside the home in rich countries e.g. Ireland, US, I hear building inspectors say that if normal home air quality was extant in restaurants they would be immediately shut down.

So there is a technological problem here.

I also heard from a lifetime expert in HVAC say that venting air from cooking food with our appliances does not actually work properly at all, and also that we introduce humid air into our homes for which there is apparently (so I'm told) no current controls and this causes mold growths thus lowering IAQ.

I'm not an expert but it does seem like more could be done.

In my history I have a nice few videos documenting some evidence about the importance of IAQ and improving it, if you're interested I'll dig them up.

I would be really interested in seeing those videos - and I am sure other readers would appreciate it as well!

From this thread "How Trees Calm Us Down": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12053272

Japanese researcher describes (with control group) the interesting affects of walking in a forest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jPNll1Ccn0

Indian researcher describes side affects of indoor plants on health esp. air quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmn7tjSNyAA

I'm incorporating some of these concepts into my tiny house design e.g. a (truly ingenious design using mirrors!) terrarium and an hinoki ofuro, together with natural daylighting.

A poster called mantesso offered up this interesting paper: Here's the original study from NASA, Interior Landscape plants for indoor air pollution abatement :

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1993007...

The article makes no mention of repeated measurements or a time period over which the subjects were studied. There's evidence of an association, but I see no evidence that exposure to air pollution causes diabetes. It might have been more effective had they studied these people longitudinally.

One confounding factor is that homes which are in direct proximity to high-traffic areas are cheaper than homes which aren't. The price factors in the noise pollution from the road, which also likely correlates with air pollution. It would be interesting to see what the relationship is between pre-diabetes and income, because I think that that's actually the relationship they're seeing.

We do know that poor air quality has detrimental impacts on the body, though, so I could be wrong.

Ok.

Pollution --> allergies and congestion --> obstructed breathing (both waking and sleeping) --> exhaustion --> pre-existing established links to diabetes, both the stress of exhaustion and the resulting challenge to leading a healthy lifestyle (diet, exercise, social fulfillment, etc.)

Yes, seems a long chain of inference. However, having had personal experience with this (minus the diabetes, so far), my personal observation has supported it substantially and in manifold detail in my own mind.

A retrospective study, the kind of study that notoriously cannot distinguish causes from effects. The fact that the subjects are drawn from an existing population who live in high-pollution areas is not, and cannot be, eliminated as a cofactor. In short, do these people have diabetes because they're exposed to pollutants, or is the state of their health and their place of residence both connected to some third unexamined factor? The study cannot tell us.

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