ASH 2024 | The association between environmental pollution and the severity of MDS

So, you know, climate change is really something that’s imminent and globally we’re seeing worse air quality day by day. We really wanted to look at if worse air quality has an effect of causing or an association with the worsened severity of hematologic malignancies. We chose to look at patients with myelodysplastic syndromes in an underserved area, which is the Bronx in the greater New York area. We used residential addresses of our patients with a diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndromes. We used overlay with what we call a land use regression model with outdoor air pollutant exposure, and we were specifically interested in querying black carbon and PM2.5. What we found was very interesting, which is that black carbon specifically correlated with worse mutations in myelodysplastic syndrome, like having TP53 mutations, and it also correlated with a higher grade or higher severity of the disease as measured by the International Prognostic Scoring System, or the IPSS. We didn’t particularly find a correlation with worse survival, but these are kind of hard to estimate in epidemiologic studies, you know, and treatment factors also play a role in survival. So we do hope that our study can actually lead to improved policy change in this area in terms of regulating air quality. In addition to this, we also did murine modeling of the work. And we found that mice in our lab that were exposed to a higher quantity of black carbon and particulate matter 2.5 compared to controls had much higher inflammation in their system as measured by IL-1 beta, you know, other important cytokines. And I think this gives us some scientific background as to why people might have worse disease with exposure to worse air quality comes worse inflammation.

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