How Household HEPA Filters Improve Brain Function

We recently talked about how You May Have More Air Pollution In Your Home Than In The Street, but now here’s a more positive reason to take the same action (i.e., get cleaner indoor air).

Specifically, the latest research shows how a HEPA filter air purifier can be…

A breath of fresh air for your brain

Researchers (Dr. Misha Eliasziw et al.) analyzed data from 119 people aged 30–74 living in Somerville, Massachusetts, an area with relatively high traffic-related air pollution because of nearby major highways.

Now, that’s about the air that’s outside, but what about inside? Well, guess where the inside air comes from!

So, participants used a genuine HEPA purifier for one month, and a sham purifier for another month, with a one-month washout period between them. The sham device looked and operated like the real purifier but did not contain an air-cleaning filter.

After each intervention period, participants did the “Trail Making Test”, which assesses processing speed, visual-motor skills, mental flexibility, and executive function.

The results, in few words: among participants aged 40 and older*, the time taken in the test was 12% faster after a month of HEPA filtration than after sham filtration, averaging 54.0 seconds versus 61.4 seconds.

^{*Notably, the improvement was not seen in participants younger than 40.}

As to why this happens, particulate air pollution has been strongly associated with cardiovascular and neurological diseases, including conditions affecting the brain. Previous research also suggests that cognitive function can be affected after relatively short periods of pollution exposure.

We wrote about that here: How To Increase Your Dementia Risk By 17%

As for this most recent study, you can read it in full here: Effect of HEPA filtration air purifiers on cognitive function from a secondary outcome analysis of a pragmatic randomized crossover trial

Air purifiers can be definitely be of benefit in other ways, too, for example: Air Purifiers & Sleep

But watch out! Because if you don’t clean/change the filter regularly, guess what happens! That’s right, it’ll be colonized with bacteria/fungus and then be blowing those at you.

And one quick final warning: do you have any of those plug-in air-freshening devices? They may smell clean, but they are invariably effectively spraying cleaning fluids into your lungs. So please don’t!

Don’t have an air purifier and want one?

We don’t sell them, but here’s an example on Amazon, for your convenience 😎

Want to take a more holistic approach?

The air is a very important factor for the health of your lungs (and thus, for the health of everything that’s fed oxygen by your lungs), but there are more things we can do as well:

Consider: Seven Things To Do For Good Lung Health!

Want to learn more?

And for a much deeper dive into the broader topic of avoiding the toxins the industrial world is keen to throw our way, you might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:

Healthy Living in a Contaminated World – by Dr. Donald Hoernschemeyer

Take care!