Wildfires and agriculture and farming emissions may pose especially toxic threats to cognitive health, according to a new study.

Increasingly, evidence shows exposure to air pollution emissions makes the brain susceptible to dementia. The findings of the new study, published in JAMA Medicine, point to a strong likelihood that agriculture and wildfires, with their release of a range of harmful emissions at high concentrations, need to be more closely studied and monitored for their risks to public health, specifically dementia.

“We saw in our research that all airborne particles increased the risk of dementia but those generated by agricultural settings and wildfires seemed to be especially toxic for the brain,” says Sara Adar, associate chair of the department of epidemiology in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. She currently leads several large cohort studies on the impacts of exposures on cognitive aging and dementia.

“Our findings indicate that lowering levels of particulate matter air pollution, even in a relatively clean country like the United States, may reduce the number of people developing dementia in late life,” Adar says.

“This work suggests that particulate matter air pollution from agriculture and wildfires might be more neurotoxic compared with other sources. However, more research is needed to confirm these effects, especially for these two sources which have received less attention in prior research,” says Boya Zhang, a research fellow who focuses on the effects of air pollution on cardiopulmonary disease and cognitive aging.

“Given that the development of dementia could take a long time, this study mainly aimed to provide evidence for policymakers to reduce exposures to these sources of emissions.”

Read the full article about wildfire risk by Kim North Shine at Futurity.