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Environmental pollution is associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorders in the US and Den


With outstanding teamwork and great efforts from my colleagues, we recently published a trailblazing study on the association between environmental pollution and psychiatric disorders in the United States and Denmark. We did advance computational investigation to study the complex interactions of environmental factors that are predictive of neuropsychiatric conditions.


This study is notable for its breadth, we analyzed over 150 million patients in the US and applied our model to Denmark to study the entire population of the country born between 1979 and 2002. The analyses showed that air and land pollution were significant predictors for the clinical frequency of several psychiatric disorders. An in-depth understanding of the environmental influence on mental health is needed to better characterize the health effects of exposure to pollutants. Evidence from most recent animal studies shows that air pollution causes neuroinflammation, which specifically supports our findings from massive clinical data mining.


The study was published in PLOS Biology on August 20, 2019.


Khan A, Ripoll OP, Antonsen S, Brandt J, Geels C, Landecker H, Sullivan PF, Pedersen CB, Rzhetsky A, “Environmental pollution is associated with increased risk of psychiatric disorders in the US and Denmark”, PLOS Biology. August 2019.





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