Associations of Air Pollution on the Brain in Children: A Brain Imaging Study

Research Report 209, available for downloading below, presents a study by Mònica Guxens of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and colleagues. The team used new neuroimaging technology to assess the possible relationship of air pollution exposure during pregnancy and childhood with brain outcomes in children.

Guxens, the 2016 recipient of HEI’s Walter A. Rosenblith New Investigator Award, and her team studied brain structural and functional measures using neuroimaging techniques in Generation R, an existing birth cohort in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The investigators used air pollution data and neuroimaging data collected in about 800 school-age children and in about 3,100 pre-adolescents. Early-life exposure was estimated at the residential address level for various air pollutants using existing land-use regression models, mainly from the European ESCAPE project.