The Role of Chronic Exposure to Ambient Air Pollution in Dementia and Cognitive Aging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As average life-expectancy increases worldwide, there is a heightened public health concern about impaired cognitive function and dementia with advancing age. There are an estimated 10 million new cases of dementia each year and the worldwide prevalence is expected to triple by 2050. Without current effective treatment, research has expanded to identify modifiable risk factors for dementia to promote healthy cognitive aging. Air pollution is a unique modifiable risk factor as levels can be shaped by individual behaviors and population-level environmental policies and regulations. Ambient air pollution is a mixture of particulate matter, gases, and other organic and metallic components. Emerging evidence suggests chronic exposure may affect diseases of the central nervous system, including dementia and cognitive impairment. It is biologically plausible that increased exposure to air pollution can produce a neuroinflammatory response, which in turn can result in structural changes in the brain. Although epidemiologic studies have observed a link among some populations, the causal pathway between air pollution and dementia remains unclear and these studies are subject to specific methodological challenges.The first chapter of this dissertation reviews the epidemiological evidence regarding the relationship between dementia, cognitive impairment, and air pollution and outlines some methodological challenges my research addresses. The second chapter demonstrates different methods to account for competing events in a cohort of older adults in France and provides recommendations for future research in studies of air pollution and dementia. The third chapter examines the causal pathway between air pollution and dementia, evaluating cardiovascular disease as a potential intermediate in a population-based cohort in Ontario, Canada. The fourth chapter expands the generalizability of the current research by examining the relationship between air pollution and cognitive impairment in a US cohort of Hispanic/Latino adults, an understudied ethnic group with well-documented disparities in both air pollution exposure and chronic health outcomes. The final chapter of this dissertation summarizes key findings and highlights future directions to advance epidemiologic research of air pollution and cognitive aging.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".