Key Points
And air pollution isn't just causing lung cancer, it may cause other cancers tooincluding neck cancer and mesotheliomaand diseases such as cardiovascular disease, strokes, heart attacks, type 2 diabetes, and neurodegenerative disease..
We urgently need public health measures to lower pollution levels...
Recently, weve shown a close association between rising air pollution levelsspecifically 2.5 micrometers particles (known as PM 2.5) from diesel exhaust and coal-fired power stationsand increasing incidence of lung cancer in patients whove never smoked..
In other words, the cancer-causing mutation and the air pollution work together in the right cell at the wrong time to initiate a cancer...
This causes chronic long-term inflammation, which we speculate may be the central cause for the underlying pathologies associated with pollution, leading to damage to the pancreas, for example, or type-two diabetes, or damage to blood vessels, which results in strokes and heart attacks...
