Yet another study is out confirming the link between air pollution and brain damage. Published recently in the Archives of Internal Medicine, this is one of the largest to ever explore the connection, relying on interviews with 22,000 women over a period of six years. It concludes that long-term exposure to Particulate Matter, or soot, reduces a woman's cognitive functions. "We keep learning about more adverse effects (from pollution) than we thought possible,” said Jean Ospital, health effects officer with the South Coast Air Quality Management District who was not involved with the current research. “I’m not sure I find these results surprising,” he said, “but I’m also not sure I would have expected them if you’d asked me 10 years ago.” For years, environmental health experts have been urging regulators to get more serious about regulating PM pollution based on the wide variety of injuries it causes, even at currently "safe" levels of exposure. Regulators have stalled, because even more than smog, PM pollution is ubiquitous, being released by everything that has a flame or dust or both -  from backyard grills and home fireplaces to internal combustion engines, to industrial processes of all kinds - cement plants, power plants, smelters, gas drilling, steel mills, etc. Only last week 11 states went to court to sue the Obama Administration for purposely delaying the downward revision of PM standards, saying in their challenge that new rules for PM exposure were vital to public health. This new study links the kind of decline in brain function identified with PM pollution to an increase in dementia diagnoses, already beginning to rise significantly. This has a significant public policy aspect that was noted by the study's main author, Jeanifer Weuve of Rush University Medical Center, “What’s interesting about air pollution is that other factors that may cause dementia are generally found at the more individual level – diet, weight, smoking. And we can help to try to prevent them at that level. But in this case, we’re looking at something that we can do to intervene at a broad scale, with society at large. It's a whole new way to think about prevention for dementia and cognitive decline."