Scientists: Living in Air Polluted Areas Increases the Risk of Depression 
dirty air people have a higher risk of developing depression. An article devoted to the dangerous effects of a polluted atmosphere was published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
Depression can develop in everyone, but some people are at higher risk of developing it due to genetic factors. In the experiment, researchers from the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, Johns Hopkins University and Peking University involved 352 volunteers living in the capital of China. Based on genotyping for each of them, scientists calculated a risk score for developing depression, taking into account only the genetic risks. The researchers then collected information on how much people had been exposed to air pollution over the past six months.
The subjects were then forced to undergo a series of cognitive tests in which the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to track which areas of the brain them are activated. In parallel with passing the test, people were subjected to social stress – negatively speaking about their results. The researchers were able to reveal that neural networks were destroyed due to the work of genes associated with depression and dirty air.
Scientists also compared neural networks obtained from the brain tissue of deceased people with those of the participants in the experiment. They found that in people with a higher genetic predisposition to depression living in more polluted areas, the genes responsible for depression were more likely to be expressed together. It was also found that this set of genes is involved in the processes associated with inflammation.