Aims: The BREATHE (brain development and air pollution ultrafine particles in school children) project aims to discover the effects of urban air pollution on neuropsychological and neurostructural development. The neuropsychological effects of air pollution result in acute and long-term changes, both of which are measurable. For this reason, in the ongoing BREATHE project a novel approach is applied to assess the neuropsychological function of children. The aim of the present study is to present the first results in the neuropsychological assessment area.
Methods: During the year 2012, 39 schools in Barcelona, Spain were selected for participation to test the newly developed strict protocol for the assessment of several neuropsychological functions. Four annual visits were scheduled and 2.740 children were evaluated using two different computerized paradigms, namely n-back task, a popular paradigm for studying working memory, and attentional network task (ANT), a task created to assess the three attentional networks: alerting, orienting and conflict.
Results: Up to date, we have completed two of the four annual visits during 2012. The preliminary results showed that the accuracy of n-back and ANT tasks increased by age, while the reaction time diminished. In addition, those children with higher inattentive symptomatology or worse school achievement levels obtained lower scores, especially in the n-back task. Surprisingly, the accuracy indexes obtained in the second visit were lower than in the first visit.
Conclusions: The results suggest that the protocol used in the BREATHE project is able to detect variability in the neuropsychological functions assessed.
