Despite such clear connections between radon exposure and health consequences ranging from chronic inflammation to cancer and neurodegenerative disease, few studies have investigated other deleterious effects that radon may have, including
in the realm of neurocognitive development. Particularly lacking is research involving youths, despite children being highly vulnerable to the effects of toxic exposures,
and thus potentially more vulnerable to the damaging effects of radon
(Kend all et al., 2021).
In the present study, we investigated the impact of home radon exposure on the neural oscillatory dynamics serving attentional reorienting in typically developing children and adolescents. To measure the neural processing underlying attentional reorienting, youths completed a classic Posner paradigm during high-density MEG. Home radon test kits were used to measure indoor radon concentrations in the family home. We hypothesized that the effects of radon exposure would be most notable in the theta, alpha, and beta range given their known developmental sensitivity in this paradigm and other higher order cognitive tasks. We predicted that chronic home radon exposure would be related to aberrations in task performance and neural oscillations within attention networks, such that children with higher radon exposure would exhibit both behavioral and neural decrements in attentional reorienting. Further, given the known exceptional sensitivity of these developing networks to environmental toxins, we explored potential interactions between age and radon exposure to see whether radon may be modulating expected developmental trajectories of these neural dynamics
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Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811924001010
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