Michael: Hi! My name is Michael, and I am 14 years old. I am also from Chicago, Illinois. I want to know, how does air pollution affect my body?
Dr. Mark Schenker: Michael, that’s an excellent question, and let me explain some of the ways that air pollution can affect the body. I’ll start with the most mild effects and progress to the more serious effects.
At the mild end it can cause irritation of the eyes and nose and the throat. You get watering of the eyes, soreness in the throat, coughing.
Moving on to more serious effects, when it gets into the lungs it can cause a narrowing of the airway, so that one has more difficulty in getting air through the lungs to the body. This is similar to what one sees in asthma, which in fact can be caused or exacerbated by air pollution.
Moving on, one sees effects on the heart, with variability in heart rate, and even exacerbation of underlying heart disease. And at the most extreme end, after many years of exposure, we see increased risk of lung cancer. So there is a spectrum of effects of air pollution on the body, from the mild to the most serious, with increase in disease and even death from air pollutant exposure.
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