Grants and Fellowships | 2014

53 Post-Doctoral Fellowships Association of Long-Term Exposure to Air Pollution and Noise with Neurocognitive Functions in the Heinz Nixdorf Recall Study Cohort Investigations of the association between air pollution and ambient noise to neurocognitive function are scarce, mostly performed on children and adolescent populations, and the results are inconsistent. The effect of long-term air pollution and ambient noise exposures on cognitive functions and on Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) (the intermediate state between normal cognitive aging and dementia) in the adult population has not yet been investigated. The post-doctoral project is performed on participants from the Heinz Nixdorf Recall Study (Risk factors, Evaluation of Coronary Calcium and Lifestyle), a population-based longitudinal study from three cities in the German Ruhr Area: Bochum, Essen and Mülheim/Ruhr. We estimated exposure to the air pollutants PM 2.5 , PM 10 , and NO 2 using two types of exposure models – European Air Pollution Dispersion and Chemistry Transport Model (EURAD-CTM), and land use regression ESCAPE-LUR. Long-term exposure to traffic noise was modeled as weighted 24-h mean (L DEN ) and weighted night-time mean (L NIGHT ) in dB(A). 4,814 randomly chosen participants (45-75 years of age) were enrolled into the study between December 2000 and August 2003. After five years (2006-2008) the first follow-up visit was performed, and it included a screening test of amnestic and cognitive functioning. Five tests were used to assess the cognitive status of participants: immediate and delayed word recall tests, clock drawing test, labyrinth test, and animal naming test. Results of each of these tests were normalized and adjusted for age and education status of participants based on age-specific norms of cognitive subtests for the German general population. A global cognitive score was calculated as a sum of normalized scores of performance for the five tests used for cognitive assessment. Of the 4086 participants that completed the cognitive tests, 579 were diagnosed with MCI (n=309 amnestic and n=283 non-amnestic MCI). The aim of this study is to analyze the associations between long-term exposure to air pollution and ambient noise and the following outcomes: overall MCI, amnestic and non-amnestic MCI subtypes, each of the five cognitive tests independently, and with a global cognitive score. The analysis will be performed using cross-sectional and longitudinal study designs. Research publications (1) Tzivian, L., Winkler, A., Dlugaj, M., Schikowski, T., Vossoughi, M., Fuks, K., Weinmayr, G., & Hoffmann, B. (2014). Effect of long-term outdoor air pollution and noise on cognitive and psychological functions in adults. Review article. International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health . doi: 10.1016/j.ijheh.2014.08.002 Fellow Lillian Tzivian IUF Leibniz Research Institute for Environmental Medicine, Germany Supervisor Barbara Hoffmann 2013-2015