Bad air quality may raise cognitive problems in babies

New Delhi: Poor air quality in India could be causing cognitive deficits in babies and toddlers, according to new research.

Researchers from the University of East Anglia in the UK worked with the Community Empowerment Lab in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, to see how in-home air quality affects infants' cognition. They worked with families from a range of socio-economic backgrounds in Shivgarh, a rural community in Uttar Pradesh - one of the states in India that has been most strongly impacted by poor air quality.

In the study, the team assessed the visual working memory and visual processing speed of 215 infants using a specially-designed cognition task from October 2017 to June 2019. "The research for the first time shows that there is an association between poor air quality and impaired visual cognition in the first two years of life, when brain growth is at its peak," said lead researcher Prof John Spencer, from UEA's School of Psychology.

"Such impacts could carry forward across years, negatively impacting long-term development," he added, in the paper published in the journal eLife. Spencer said that previous studies have linked poor air quality with cognitive deficits in children, as well as to emotional and behavioural problems.

But "until now, studies had failed to show a link between poor air quality and cognitive problems in babies, when brain growth is at its peak and the brain may be particularly sensitive to toxins. Our study is the first to show this association", Spencer said.