Health Reports

A Canadian peer-reviewed journal of population health and health services research

July 2020

The association between ambient air pollution concentrations and psychological distress

by Lauren Pinault, Errol M. Thomson, Tanya Christidis, Ian Colman, Michael Tjepkema, Aaron van Donkelaar, Randall V. Martin, Perry Hystad, Hwashin Shin, Daniel L. Crouse, and Richard T. Burnett

In addition to having well-established associations with respiratory and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, air pollution has been linked to a range of neurological and psychiatric disorders, including dementia, cognitive decline or impairment, anxiety and depression, and suicide. A growing body of controlled experimental research supports these epidemiological associations. This research includes evidence that air pollution can impair spatial learning and memory, and provoke depressive-like behaviour in mice. A number of biological mechanisms have been proposed to explain these associations. For example, exposure to inhaled pollutants has been shown to activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress axis in rats, resulting in increased blood levels of the glucocorticoid corticosterone, and systemic regulation of stress, metabolic, and inflammatory pathways across multiple tissues. Acute activation of the HPA axis is a critical adaptive response to stressors. However, chronic stress and glucocorticoid dysregulation are associated with many disease processes, including anxiety, depression, impaired cognition, chronic pain and fatigue syndrome, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Chronic exposure to air pollution—in conjunction with exposure to other stressors and interaction with host susceptibility traits—could lead to HPA axis dysfunction and observable stress-related or distress-related outcomes, including neurological, metabolic, cardiovascular and reproductive disorders. Accordingly, stress-related outcomes in the causal pathway between air pollutant exposure and disease should be investigated to substantiate the link between pollutant-dependent neuroendocrine stress responses and impacts on the brain.

Abstract Full article PDF version The Daily release

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The association between ambient air pollution concentrations and psychological distress

International population-based health surveys linked to outcome data: A new resource for public health and epidemiology

by Stacey Fisher, Carol Bennett, Deirdre Hennessy, Tony Robertson, Alastair Leyland, Monica Taljaard, Claudia Sanmartin, Prabhat Jha, John Frank, Jack V. Tu, Laura C. Rosella, JianLi Wang, Christopher Tait, and Douglas G. Manuel

In Canada and elsewhere, national population-based health surveys are increasingly being linked to vital statistics and health care data, bringing together large amounts of high-quality, nationally representative information about health risk factors with individual-level health outcomes. Health surveys in Canada and the United States alone have collected detailed sociodemographic and health behaviour information from over 1 million respondents since 1997, and have been linked to over 6 million person-years of mortality follow-up. Because national health surveys often have similar surveillance objectives and designs, pooling data from linked population health surveys could create a new resource for health surveillance and research, with an unparalleled international and population perspective.

Abstract Full article PDF version The Daily release

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International population-based health surveys linked to outcome data: A new resource for public health and epidemiology

  • Sanmartin C, Decady Y, Trudeau R, et al. Linking the Canadian Community Health Survey and the Canadian Mortality Database: An enhanced data source for the study of mortality. Health Reports 2016; 27(12): 10-18.
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