Air pollution is associated with an increased risk of progressive and irreversible vision loss, known as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), reveals a large long-term study led by UCL researchers.
They found that people in the most polluted areas were at least 8% more likely to report having AMD, according to the findings published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
Lead author, Professor Paul Foster (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology), said: “Here we have identified another health risk associated with air pollution, reinforcing the evidence that the air that is being improved should be improved. breathing is a key public health priority. Our findings suggest that living in an area with potentially polluted air, in particular hateful or comb-related materials from road traffic, should be maintained. contribute to eye disease.
“Even a low level of air pollution appears to outweigh the risk of AMD, suggesting that air pollution is an important adaptive risk factor that affects the risk of eye disease for a large number of people.”
AMD is a major cause of unavoidable blindness among people over 50 in high-income countries, with the numbers expected to reach 300 million by 2040. Risk factors include risk factors known are old age, smoking, and genetic predisposition.
Air pollution has been implicated in brain conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and stroke, and a 2019 study by the same research team found that air pollution was associated with an increased risk of glaucoma. Exposure of specific material is one of the strongest indicators of mortality among air pollutants.
To see if air pollution is also at risk for AMD, the researchers extracted data from 115,954 UK Biobank study participants aged 40-69 without eye problems at the start of this study in 2006.
Participants were asked to report any formal diagnosis of AMD by a physician. And structural changes in the thickness and / or numbers of light receptors in the retina – a hallmark of AMD – were assessed in 52,602 participants, with full data available in 2009 and 2012, using retinal imaging (noninvasive optical coherence tomography or OCT).
Environmental air pollution measures included those for granular material (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and nitrogen oxides (NOx). Estimates for these were provided by the Small Area Health Statistics Unit as part of the BioSHaRE-EU Environmental Health Decision Project. Official traffic, land use and topography information was used to estimate average annual air pollution levels at participants’ home addresses.
The research team found that people in areas with higher levels of fine pollution were more likely to report having AMD (in particular, they found an 8% difference in AMD risk between people living in the 25th and 75th degree of pollution), after outlining factors that may influence such basic health and lifestyle conditions. All contaminants, with the exception of coarse-grained material, were associated with changes in retinal structure.
The researchers warn that this speculative study cannot prove a cause, but their findings align with evidence from elsewhere in the world.
Although they cannot yet determine equipment, they suggest that environmental air pollution may be associated with AMD through oxidative stress or inflammation.
Dr Sharon Chua (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology), the paper’s first author, said: “Higher levels of air pollution were also linked to the structural features of AMD. This could indicate that higher levels of air pollution could lead to the more vulnerable cells. adverse changes and increased risk of AMD. ”
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The study was funded by Moorfields Eye Charity, the NIHR Biomedical Research Center at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Alcon Research Institute, and the International Glaucoma Association.
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