Air pollution from biomass burning disrupts early adolescent cortical microarchitecture development.

Exposure to outdoor particulate matter (PM _2.5 ) represents a ubiquitous threat to human health, and particularly the neurotoxic effects of PM _2.5 from multiple sources may disrupt neurodevelopment. Studies addressing neurodevelopmental implications of PM exposure have been limited by small, geographically limited samples and largely focus either on macroscale cortical morphology or postmortem histological staining and total PM mass. Here, we leverage residentially assigned exposure to six, data-driven sources of PM _2.5 and neuroimaging data from the longitudinal Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD Study®), collected from 21 different recruitment sites across the United States. To contribute an interpretable and actionable assessment of the role of air pollution in the developing brain, we identified alterations in cortical microstructure development associated with exposure to specific sources of PM _2.5 using multivariate, partial least squares analyses. Specifically, average annual exposure (i.e., at ages 8-10 years) to PM _2.5 from biomass burning was related to differences in neurite development across the cortex between 9 and 13 years of age.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)