Breathing the smoke expelled from car exhaust pipes can affect the cholesterol that circulates in our blood, altering the cardiovascular protective qualities of the so-called "good cholesterol" and transforming it into "bad cholesterol." This may clot your arteries.
To demonstrate this, Jesús Araujo and his colleagues from the Department of Environmental Cardiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California (USA) studied the effects of emissions from a diesel engine in laboratory mice for two weeks, and compared them with other rodents that were placed in a clean air environment in the same period. In this way they verified that those exposed to the emissions of a vehicle suffered oxidative damage in the blood and the liver, which a week later had not been reversed.
"This is the first study to show that air pollutants favor a form of cholesterol that encourages bacteria to collapse and can lead to heart disease and heart attacks," explains Araujo, who has released his results in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology. Thus, after exposure to gas emissions for several hours a day several days a week, the animals had lost the ability to protect themselves against oxidation and inflammation produced by low-density lipoprotein, better known as "bad cholesterol" ( LDL for its acronym in English).
