If Air Pollution Doesn't Cause Sudden Cardiac Death, It Can Drive You to Suicide

First came news that air pollution from traffic increases the risk of sudden cardiac death among people who have lung or heart disease (itself associated with air pollution). Then came news that air pollution might also have a direct relationship with increased risk of suicide.

An Atlanta-based study, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, found that the traffic pollution is associated with reduced heart rate variability (HRV), which in turn increases risk of sudden cardiac death.

This may help explain why previous research has shown people are more prone to heart attack in the hour immediately after sitting in traffic.

As if that's not scary enough, another study, this one in South Korea, has demonstrated a link between suicide and high levels of particulate pollution. New Scientist also reports that "researchers who in the 1990s linked air pollution to asthma in a large group of Taiwanese children have now found that those with the condition were subsequently more likely to have killed themselves."

Suicides were found to be more common in the two days following exposure to a spike in pollution levels, and the asthma researchers found in their follow-up research that suicide was more than twice as common in the more than 160,000 schoolchildren they had identified with air pollution-related asthma. And the risk increased directly with the severity of their symptoms at the start of the study.

Knowing all the other effects that air pollution can have on health, cleaning up our atmosphere seems evermore important. Find out how your city ranks in air quality, and think about at least monitoring (and cleaning up) the air inside your home as a good place to start.