Air pollution is making us age faster

The noise is overwhelming and the traffic buzzes past with a relentless pulsing beat.

Being on foot places you in the most vulnerable group of commuters in a landscape where road safety etiquette does not match the rest of the country.

Welcome to London.

The busiest city in the UK and home to one of the fastest paces of human life in the world.

We have beautiful parks in the nation’s capital. The lungs of the city, which provide a vital space for the toxic fumes to be absorbed and converted to oxygen.

But the air you inhale every day as you walk down a London street, falls woefully short of air quality standards.

And your skin is feeling the effects. As the front line barrier to the onslaught of pollution, your skin is tasked with converting poisonous gases into digestible material for your body.

Dr Mervyn Patterson, a cosmetic doctor at Woodford Medical based in London, is seeing patients every day who present with skin pigmentation – a symptom of air pollution.‘Large population-based studies now show that there is a definite link between unwanted facial pigmentation and the level of air pollution. These are population studies in both Germany and China, which show a very definite connection.

‘There was a weak correlation with wrinkling on the face but it was facial pigmentation that was the most striking correlation with the levels of air pollution.’

That’s a trend which has been noted by Dr Patterson at Woodford Medical in the UK’s capital.

We have several clinics across the UK, but it is the London based clinic where the biggest rise in facial pigmentation is being seen.’

This is a campaign theme for Greenpeace, who advocate for more electric technology and an end to fossil fuel use.

‘There’s research, and the Government themselves estimate, that air pollution in the UK is causing the equivalent of between 40 – 50,000 premature deaths every year,’ said Anna Jones, a campaigner with Greenpeace for better air quality.

‘People are having their lives shortened by exposure to air pollution’, Anna continues. ‘This is exacerbating respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and things like lung cancer and dementia.’

The ageing effects of surviving in such an urban landscape have also been investigated at Kings College London, as Julia Fussell explains.

Research which has looked at the skin of women that live in urban areas versus more rural areas and they have found that the former who are exposed to a lot more traffic related pollution have greater signs of ageing.

There’s more hyper pigmentation, the brown age spots, and also wrinkles compared to the women who live in the countryside.

‘We also have some emerging data that individuals that live in areas of poor air quality have compromised skin hydration, compared again to individuals that live in less polluted locations.’