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New Preprint 📖 with @rogierk.bsky.social on 🔥 Does wildfire pollution affect cognitive and brain development? We merged data sources to answer this question in ~9000 children! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... #PsychSciSky #CogPsyc #CogDev #devpsy #CogSci

Most prior neural work is cross-sectional & relies on neighborhood pollution. This is problematic because a myriad of neighborhood- and individual-level factors are associated with both brain development and pollution. Making it challenging to disentangle!

Here, we make an attempt to break this link by examining the effect of wildfire-specific pollution on within-child neural & cognitive change. We do this by matching a child’s DOB, visit date, and location to high-resolution wildfire PM2.5 data. Constructing both a perinatal and childhood exposure.

As expected, our wildfire exposures show no correlation with socioeconomic status – making it a useful method for isolating pollution. It is important to separate this design aspect from non-equal treatment effects (which could follow SES gradients).

We find no effect of additional perinatal wildfire smoke exposure on later adolescent development. This could be for a myriad of reasons: shorter exposure window, longer period between exposure & outcomes, and/or protective factors.