Your Outside Mindset - Dr. Bing Zhao: "Short term exposure (3 days or less) to air pollution increases risk of sudden cardiac arrest -- men and women over 65 yrs more susceptible."

Dr. Bing Zhao: "Short term exposure (3 days or less) to air pollution increases risk of sudden cardiac arrest -- men and women over 65 yrs more susceptible."

05/29/22 • 18 min

Dr. Bing Zhao is a geriatric doctor in the first university of science and technology of China. This hospital is in Hefei, a city located in the east China with a population of more than 9 million. She completed her medicine degree in China and PhD in University of Tasmania in Australia. Then she went to Duke University in the US as a research scholar.
Her PhD research interest is air pollution and cardiovascular diseases. She is recognized for her presentations at the youth section of annual congress of the European Society of Cardiology, the largest cardiology congress in the world. She has published several papers and one of them was published in the Lancet planetary health.
Please go to my website for the link to her paper. In my new book Optimize Your Heart Rate I tell the story of my close friend Leslie, aged 64 and apparently healthy with no diagnosis of heart disease, who died of sudden cardiac arrest after 2 days on a road trip.
Time line of my interview with Dr. Bing Zhao
3:29 Breathing polluted air threatens our hearts
4:19 The consequences of PM2.5 particulate matter is dramatic
5:03 PM 2.5 is a mix of solid and liquid - very thin- less than the size of a strand hair -goes right to lungs and heart
7:22 Study in Japan nation wide - Out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) - compared # of OHCA with air pollution over 3 days.
7:58 1/4 million cases over 2 years - 65 years of age increased incidence
8:30 Japan has air quality stations all over the world
9:01 Cardiac arrest occurs when the heart suddenly stops pumping = major medical emergency
9:42 Study finding: Short term exposure to PM2.5 up to 3 days associated with increased risk of OHCA -- men and women over 65 more susceptible
10:24 Gases in traffic emissions - nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide
11:02 What surprised Dr Zhao the most? People assume that air quality is safe at levels at levels below WHO levels. There are no safe levels of PM 2.5 air pollution for our hearts.
11:35 Current air pollution policy has to be changed
12:28 We need new health care responses to air pollution
Chose public transportation over cars, use air purifiers indoors, and access green space in day to day activity.
14:49 Acute exposure to air pollution increases risk of sudden cardiac arrest in less than 3 days.
18:43 Time line and more info on my website https://treesmendus.com
For the story of my life long friend Leslie who died of a sudden cardiac arrest at the age of 63 on day 3 of her road trip see my new book Optimize Your Heart Rate: B

For peer reviewed research on how your time spent in green space can change your mindset, balance your nervous system and your heart rate please go to verlafortier.substack.com and check out my books Take Back Your Outside Mindset: Live Longer, Stress Less, and Control Your Chronic Illness and Optimize Your Heart Rate: Balance Your Mind and Body With Green Space

Previous Episode

UK Researcher Andy Jones: "Green Space consistently provides 20% reduction in bad things, if we had a pill for that, we would take it."

Time stamp interview notes continued on my website: https://treesmendus.com
My new book Optimize Your Heart Rate: Balance Your Mind and Body With Green Space
1:19 Professor Andy Jones is a public health academic who holds the position of professorial fellow in Norwich Medical School at the University of East Anglia in the UK. He has wide ranging interests including the pragmatic evaluation of public health interventions, the role of the environment as a determinant of health and related behaviours, and the impact of access to services on health outcomes. He has a strong focus on policy and delivery in his work and collaborates with several key organisations working in this field, including the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and Cancer Research UK.
Interview timeline:
2:20 childhood, mother took him outside along the Suffolk coastline. Studied environmental science and always interested in health. Nature and health relationship - advocate for both.
4:36 definition and history of green space, UK companies like Cadbury recognized that if you wanted productive workers, you needed healthy workers -- so developed new settlements that integrated green space - 6:47 everyone had a garden
7:31 green space in UK has been an urban centric movement eg massive Hyde Park
09:37 “The health benefits of the great outdoors: a systematic review and meta-analysis of green space exposure and health outcomes.” Published in the Journal Environmental Research, 2018. What did you want to know? The process? Individual studies may not offer a strong case for causality but when you combine individual studies in a way that allows for more broad conclusions. According to 290 million people in 140 studies (96% of studies from last 10 years – illustrating the rapid growth in green space and health). Living close to green space and spending time outside has significant and wide ranging benefits. Time in green space reduces risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, premature death, stress, high blood pressure.
10:02 Review of the literature, systematic, so that somebody else can some along and do the same thing - and would get the same thing.
10:53 Why did do review? Take stock, let's try and cut through all the noise and get the signal. Find out what is common.
11:57 looked at everything except mental health
12:34 Health outcomes that we can measure - heart rate, heart rate variability HRV, mortality, cortisol levels
13: 26 143 studies - signal, explosion of interest
14:41 Populations in green space had better health outcome, particularly stress outcomes 1) heart rate and 2) heart rate variability HRV 3) cardiac mortality
15:56 Results: 20% reduction

Next Episode

Michelle Olson, Social Gerontologist Combines Expressive Arts with Outdoor Therapy for Dementia Care

Michelle Olson, PhD, LCAT, ATR-BC, ACC/MC

Founder, Executive Director www.evergreenminds.org
Verla's website https://treesmendus.com
Verla's new book Optimize Your Heart Rate: BalanceYour Mind and Body With Green Space.

Verla's previous book Take Back Your Outside Mindset: Live Longer, Stress Less, and Control Your Chronic Illness

1:19 Michelle Olson is a social gerontologist, who started as a creative arts therapist with WWII vets who had serious mental health and dementia. Expressive arts include visual arts, music, dance and drama.

05:15 What makes the difference is the ability of people who are experiencing mental difficulties to communicate in different ways.

6:21 Michelle Olson: "When people lose the ability to talk... they can still move their bodies and use their senses -- as ways to connect and feel better."

7:19 Michelle Olson: "to do this as a family member -- we sometimes make it harder than we need to make it. It is the simple things sometimes the activity might be -- being together outdoors. Here we might spend time noticing the leaves or the light, the shadows, the textures....

7:38 Maybe its the smell in the air

7:49 Sometimes I do forest therapy with clients and we turn around and notice things in different directions. Eg what does this acorn feel like? Maybe you can make a nature sculpture - something that will recreate this time together.

8:47 Maybe a person does want to make a painting - then I focus on the process - maybe that product is interesting. Or maybe they want to make a poem - it might rhyme or it might not. It is the whole process of connecting that matters.

09:58 As a social gerontologist I am interested in where we live and what we do across out whole lives....how we eat, how we move, how we socialize, how we interact with the world, do we feel safe..

10:17 When I was an arts therapist that is when the light really went on...I wanted to know more about aging. In social gerontology we look at the person holistically over the course of their lives. The field of gerontology is growing, there are financial gerontologists, environmental gerontologists... we need to know all these perspectives.
14:00 We often don't think about environment when we think of aging. United Nations just declared access to a healthy environment a human right. We don't question why we keep patients and older people inside. Dr Allen Power says balance the risk of safety and keeping people away from natural spaces. We can ask staff