Systematic Review of Air Pollution and Late-Life Depression Association

A systematic review synthesizing evidence from 80 empirical studies on the association between air pollution exposure and late-life depression. The review, authored by Xiaofen Zhang and last updated in April 2026, highlights exposure duration as a critical modifying factor and notes pronounced geographical heterogeneity in effect estimates. It examines various pollutants including PM2.5, NO2, O3, and indoor solid fuel combustion.

Use Cases

• Assessing the modifying role of exposure duration (acute vs. long-term) on depression risk based on the review's findings.
• Investigating geographical heterogeneity in pollution effects based on the reported larger effect estimates in highly polluted regions.
• Evaluating pollutant-specific neurotoxic effects based on the analysis of PM2.5, NO2, O3, and indoor solid fuel combustion.
• Challenging the concept of a safe exposure threshold based on evidence of associations persisting in low-pollution settings.

Strengths

• Synthesizes evidence from 80 identified empirical studies, providing a broad evidence base.
• Explicitly analyzes critical modifying factors like exposure duration and pollutant type.
• Released under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license, allowing for wide reuse.

Limitations

• The dataset is a 172.6 KB document, indicating a limited scope focused on review text rather than primary data.
• Row count and column-level documentation for any underlying data are absent.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Systematic search of Web of Science, synthesizing identified empirical studies.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-22 05:47:40; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global, with noted geographical heterogeneity including studies from regions like Sweden.