Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

Re:Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in vio... by dekhn on Friday October 11, 2019 @11:44AM (#21225456)

What you did was link to a press release for a paper where they took 53 rats, removed their adrenal glands, injected them with corticosteroids, and saw they were more aggressive.

Few, if any, scientists would say that is a plausible hypothesis explaining the epidemiological results observed above. What you did was speculation with limited data and difficult transferrability (rats with adrenal glands are not representative of people exposed to air pollution).

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Re:Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in vio... by macawfish on Friday October 11, 2019 @12:34PM (#21225947)

Check out Robert Sapolsky's stuff on stress, disease and conflict in primates.

Then go and brush up on your research. Short term exposure to pollution is related to heightened inflammatory responses, which are in turn related to aggressive behavior... In humans and animals.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5874490/

There's much more where this came from.

I say "related" because we are talking about complex systems here. There are likely feedbacks involved.

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Re:Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in vio... by dekhn on Friday October 11, 2019 @12:43PM (#21226027)

hey I'm not disagreeing with exposure to pollution being related to aggressive behavior. What i'm saying is that there is no reason to believe that in this particular paper, that you can go from the epidemiological linkage results to a physical mechanism. Normally complex epidemiological observations are multifactorial, have multiple causes, and the associations are still only weakly correlated with those causal mechanisms.

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