Medical Bulletin 10/08/2023

Here are the top medical news of the day:

Air pollution associated with higher mental health service use by people with dementia

Exposure to relatively high levels of air pollution is linked to increased use of community mental health services by people with dementia, finds a large long term study focusing on a large area of London with heavy traffic and published in the open access journal BMJ Mental Health.

The researchers looked back at community mental health service use over 9 years by 5024 older people (65 and above) living in 4 boroughs of South London following their initial dementia diagnosis between 2008 and 2012.

Reference: Associations between air pollution and mental health service use in dementia: a retrospective cohort study, BMJ Mental Health, DOI 10.1136/bmjment-2023-300762

Antibiotic resistance rise may be linked to rising air pollution, study shows

Recent analysis published in The Lancet Planetary Health journal indicates that increased air pollution is potentially linked with a higher risk of antibiotic resistance across global regions. It also indicates that the relationship between the two has strengthened over time, with increases in air pollution levels coinciding with larger increases in antibiotic resistance in more recent years.

The authors created an extensive dataset to explore whether PM2.5 is a key factor driving global antibiotic resistance, using data from 116 countries from 2000 to 2018. The findings indicate antibiotic resistance increases with PM2.5, with every 1% rise in air pollution linked with increases in antibiotic resistance of between 0.5 and 1.9%, depending on the pathogen.

Reference: Association between particulate matter (PM)2·5 air pollution and clinical antibiotic resistance: a global analysis, The Lancet Planetary Health, DOI 10.1016/S2542-5196(23)00135-3/ 

Raised level of heart attack protein linked to heightened risk of death, study shows

A high level of troponin—a protein normally used to exclude the possibility of a heart attack in patients with chest pain—may signal a heightened risk of death from any cause within the next couple of years, even in the absence of known or suspected cardiovascular disease, suggests research published online in the journal Heart. High cardiac troponin levels are often seen in hospital patients who don’t have specific signs of a heart attack, but the clinical significance of this has never been clear, say the researchers.

Reference: Association between troponin level and medium-term mortality in 20 000 hospital patients, Heart, DOI 10.1136/heartjnl-2023-322463