Studies increasingly find links between air pollutants and dementia

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• Hacker News
• These sorts of pollution are largely caused by building massive amounts of car infrastructure and not building transit instead. The health effects extend beyond the direct pollution exposure to lifestyle things such as inactivity social isolation, and more.

  And yet the US largely bans healthier, denser living by law. Density grows out of less dense areas, and those less dense areas nearly all have strict density caps preventing density, as well as road infrastructure designed to never allow density. And the dense areas of the country, which already show healthier lives for people and longer lifespans, have similarly tight caps on building more density

  All this is to say that we have made a political choice as a society and are now reaping what we have sown. However we can choose something better for the future.

  by epistasis
• What really stands out is how subtle the damage can be. You're not coughing or wheezing, you're just slowly accumulating risk for something that might not show up for dades
  by BrtByte
• I think they have also done studies in rodents that show pm2.5 diesel particulate decreases insulin sensitivity.
  by mberning
• First reaction: air pollutants correlate with urban living, which correlates with access to specialized health care, which correlates with detection of dementia.
  by zahlman
• I recently found this blog post about an effective DIY air filter - explicitly filters pm2.5

  https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/measuring-my-diy-...

  I built one (< $50) and I'm pretty happy with the results. As someone with a life long sensitivity to air quality, the air definitely feels cleaner.

  by disambiguation
• Previous discussions:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45157897 (129 comments)

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44846164 (124 comments)

  by layer8
• > With increasing evidence that chronic exposure to PM2.5, a neurotoxin, not only damages lungs and hearts but is also associated with dementia, probably not.

  PM2.5 is not a neurotoxin, that's an absurd thing to say.

  It's literally any particles under a certain size. Whether it's a neurotoxin is necessarily going to depend on what the substance is made of.

  Whether your PM2.5 exposure is coming from automobiles or wildfires or a factory, the potential outcomes may be different in different areas of the body. Heck, my PM2.5 meter skyrockets whenever I cook anything in a frying pan, because many of the aerosolized oil droplets are PM2.5.

  by crazygringo
• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/health/alzheimers-dementi...
  by mackeye