In Los Angeles, Cleaner Air Is Helping Children Breathe Easier

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2015/03/19/in-los-angeles-cleaner-air-is-helping-children-breathe-easier/

By Melissa C. Lott | March 19, 2015

Children’s lungs are growing substantially stronger as air pollution in Southern California decreases.

The Los Angeles area had struggled with air pollution for decades. But, according to new research published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine, recent local air quality improvements appear to have led to a positive shift in children’s respiratory health. All told, researchers observed a 10% increase in lung growth in children between the ages of 11 to 15 compared to previous groups in their ongoing Children’s Health Study (CHS).

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“Lungs develop very rapidly from age 11 to 15 and when children are done growing – which is toward the end of their teen years – that is really the most lung function that they will have for the rest of their lives. An important criteria that is used by physicians to diagnose respiratory disease is whether or not lung function is below 80% of what is should be. And when we looked at that outcome, we saw that half as many children fell below that criteria if they were breathing cleaner air in the 2000s, compared to their cohorts who were breathing more polluted air back in the in the 1990s.”

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Conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California, the ongoing study’s latest batch of results document large gains in lung development in children between the ages of 11 and 15 from 2007 to 2011 compared to children of the same age in the same communities from 1994-98 and 1997-2001. At the same time, researchers observed significant air quality improvements in terms of both NOx and PM2.5 levels.

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