Exposure To Cooking Ultrafine Particles and Neurodegenerative Diseases: Clinical Exposure Studies and Computer Modeling

Collaborative Research Program for 2022-2024

This project provides new insights regarding the health impacts due to the exposure to UFPs. It is a highly interdisciplinary and novel project involving several majors including medical science, aerosol science, neuroscience, biology, toxicology, statistics, and engineering that significantly contributes to the science. This project is highly relevant to the Kazakhstan 2050 Strategy, where environmental monitoring will be a requirement to protect public health. The outcomes of this study will provide critical information to toxicologists, medical scientists, and regulatory organizations such as WHO, EPA, and European Commissions as well. The novel aspects of this project are discussed below. Briefly, we will characterize particle emissions including the size, mass, number, morphology and composition, and gas concentrations during WP1a. WP1a and WP1b address the nerves impact of the cooking particles. In WP2, we will quantify particle and the trace metals in the human blood samples collected in WP1a and WP1b. WP1 and WP2 will provide key information for the MD simulation in WP3b. Also, the particle characterization and gas concentrations together with the health (EEG and neuroinflammation biomarker concentrations) data will be utilized for the statistical analyses in WP3a.
Our main Hypothesis is: long-term exposure to cooking ultrafine particles promotes and/or triggers neurodegenerative diseases.
This is a quite ambitious and innovative hypothesis that requires several years of research to be conducted through several research projects. One of the sections of the broader research projects is the current proposal and we do understand that, herein, with time and budget constraints in the proposal, we will not be able to test this hypothesis in its entirety. Thus, we actively look for future grant opportunities to take steps towards testing the main hypothesis after completion of the current proposed project. In this project, given our main hypothesis and our recent findings (see the “preliminary results” section), we define the hypotheses that help us to build up our knowledge towards testing the main hypothesis. Although our main hypothesis states that chronic exposure to cooking aerosol promotes and/or triggers the neurodegenerative diseases we need to understand the age that is the trigger point for such diseases. We do know that Alzheimer is a disease that appears significantly beyond the age of 50 to 60 but we do not know exactly when this brain deterioration commences toward this disease. In the current proposal, we define our project for the populations with the age of 50 and older. However, in the future proposals we will examine the younger populations to understand the trigger point for such diseases. It is also important to note that in this study cooking aerosol and ultrafine particles refer to all particles and gases generated from the fuels, stoves, food and heated utensils, collectively. It is out of the scope of this proposal to separate the nervous impact of heated food particles from particles emitted by heating sources (fuels) and other cooking components.