Air pollution may up chronic lung disease in young adulthood

London, Nov 12 : Amid the spike in air pollution in Delhi-NCR, a new study has found that early-life events, such as the exposure to air pollutants, increase the risk of chronic lung disease in young adulthood.
The findings, published in the European Respiratory Journal, add to the growing evidence that chronic lung disease in adulthood can be traced back to childhood.
Chronic bronchitis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), with the hallmark features phlegm and irreversible airflow limitation, respectively, are lung diseases known to affect adults with a history of long-term smoking.
“We found the prevalence of chronic bronchitis and irreversible airflow limitation to be rather high considering the young age of the study participants.” said study senior author Erik Melen from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.
“Those diseases are usually diagnosed in patients older than 50 years of age,” the researchers wrote.
In the present studies, the researchers used data from birth up to age 24 years from the follow-up of the Swedish population-based birth cohort ‘BAMSE’, which includes 4,089 participants from the Stockholm area recruited 1994-96.