While it’s an important and interesting finding, the study doesn’t show that busy roads actually cause dementia. TL;DR: More research is needed.
It was conducted by researchers in Canada and followed 2.2 million people aged 55 to 85 who lived in Ontario in 2001. The researchers tracked how many of these people developed dementia or Parkinson's disease over a decade.
The study also followed 4.4 million people aged 20 to 50 over the same time period and tracked how many of those people developed multiple sclerosis.
Over the course of the study, around 244,000 people developed dementia, 32,000 people developed Parkinson's disease, and 9,000 people developed multiple sclerosis.,
The study found that around 1 in 10 of cases of dementia in people who live within 50 metres of a busy road might be attributable to traffic exposure.
That doesn't mean that 1 in 10 cases of dementia overall could be related to busy roads, just 1 in 10 of the cases among people who live close to a busy road. The flip side of that is that 9 in 10 cases of dementia in people who live close to a busy road are, according to this study, not attributable to traffic exposure.
Getting into the nitty gritty of the numbers, here's exactly what the study found:
- People living less than 50m from a busy road had a 7% higher risk of developing dementia.
- People living between 50 and 100m of a busy road had a 4% higher risk of developing dementia.
- People living within 101 and 200m of a busy road had a 2% higher risk.
- For people living more than 200m away from a busy road there was no increased risk.
The highest increased risk was among people who live within 50m of a busy road in a major city, and those who live near a busy road and did not move house during the study – both of those groups had a 12% higher risk.
No link was found between living near a busy road and an increased risk of Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis.
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