Air Quality & Your Heart

…and other items from this week’s health news:

Air considered “safe” per existing environmental standards, isn’t

Researchers (Dr. Kate Hanneman et al.) investigated how long-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5), commonly from vehicles, industrial sources, and wildfire smoke, is linked to heart damage in the form of myocardial fibrosis (a scarring of the heart tissue).

Importantly, damage was seen even at pollution levels below global air quality guidelines, indicating that some reassessment of that may be in order, and that air pollution may be an underrecognized risk factor for heart disease, contributing additional risk beyond (even more important, but already well-studied) factors like smoking and hypertension. And when we say “additional risk”, it is an addition, which meant that the strongest effects were still seen in women, smokers, and those with high blood pressure.

Read in full: Even low levels of air pollution may quietly scar your heart, MRI study finds

Related: Why Women Especially Should Watch Out For Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)

Know your own heart

A team of researchers (Dr. Judy Luu et al.) looked at 443 adults aged 35–83 with no diagnosed heart disease. Participants filled in a questionnaire that ultimately ranked their social status on a 10-rung ladder and cardiac MRI scans were used to detect signs of stress in the heart, such as cardiac inflammation, and fibrosis scarring like we talked about above.

Notably, only women with lower self-assessed status showed a correlation between that low self-assessed status and the adverse cardiac signs. Men with similarly low self-perceived status did not show the same signs, even when matched for income and education levels. The researchers hypothesize that this difference may be because women’s self-assessed social status may reflect real-life inequities better than how things look on paper, due to additional (systemically overlooked and hard-to-measure) challenges often faced by women.

Read in full: Perceived social status influences women’s cardiovascular risk

Related: Heart Health vs Systemic Stress

“Forest bathing”, without the forest

“Nature scenes are relaxing” may not be breaking news in and of itself, but researchers (Dr. Simone Kühn et al.) investigated the effect of multimodal vs unimodal forest virtual reality on stress levels.

You may be wondering: what’s multimodal vs unimodal?

• multimodal = involving multiple senses (which in processing terms, are called modalities)
• unimodal = involving just one (e.g. just visual, or just auditory, etc)

How they did it: 136 participants were first subjected to stress-inducing images (move over, Clockwork Orange), then shown a 360° VR video of a Douglas fir forest in one of four ways: sight-only, sound-only, scent-only, or all three combined.

What they found: it indeed reduces stress, and—as expected—more modalities is better than fewer. So, something to bear in mind, if experiencing VR nature scenes at home for relaxation purposes!

Read in full: Virtual forest bathing found to alleviate stress

Related: How Nature Provides Us With A Surprisingly Powerful Painkiller ← not just by relaxation, either; it interrupts the signal transmitting the pain!

Take care!