Department of Medicine, Institute of Genomics and Systems Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America.
National Centre for Register-Based Research, Aarhus BSS, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
PLoS Biol. 2019 Aug 20;17(8):e3000353. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000353. eCollection 2019 Aug.
The search for the genetic factors underlying complex neuropsychiatric disorders has proceeded apace in the past decade. Despite some advances in identifying genetic variants associated with psychiatric disorders, most variants have small individual contributions to risk. By contrast, disease risk increase appears to be less subtle for disease-predisposing environmental insults. In this study, we sought to identify associations between environmental pollution and risk of neuropsychiatric disorders. We present exploratory analyses of 2 independent, very large datasets: 151 million unique individuals, represented in a United States insurance claims dataset, and 1.4 million unique individuals documented in Danish national treatment registers. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) county-level environmental quality indices (EQIs) in the US and individual-level exposure to air pollution in Denmark were used to assess the association between pollution exposure and the risk of neuropsychiatric disorders. These results show that air pollution is significantly associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorders. We hypothesize that pollutants affect the human brain via neuroinflammatory pathways that have also been shown to cause depression-like phenotypes in animal studies.
在过去的十年中，寻找导致复杂神经精神疾病的遗传因素的研究进展迅速。尽管在确定与精神疾病相关的遗传变异方面取得了一些进展，但大多数变异对风险的个体贡献较小。相比之下，对于导致疾病的环境侵袭，疾病风险的增加似乎不那么微妙。在这项研究中，我们试图确定环境污染与神经精神疾病风险之间的关联。我们对两个独立的、非常大的数据集进行了探索性分析：美国保险理赔数据集中代表的 1.51 亿个独特个体，以及丹麦国家治疗登记处记录的 140 万个独特个体。使用美国的环境保护署（EPA）县级环境质量指数（EQI）和丹麦的个体空气污染暴露水平来评估污染暴露与神经精神疾病风险之间的关联。这些结果表明，空气污染与精神疾病风险的增加显著相关。我们假设污染物通过神经炎症途径影响人类大脑，动物研究也表明这些途径会导致类似抑郁的表型。
