空气污染对心力衰竭的代谢组学影响

原文

The global pandemics of plague and smallpox in the Middle Ages claimed hundreds of millions of lives. In this era, long before the concepts of pathogens and infectious diseases were established, people sought to make sense of these invisible threats by attributing them to divine punishment, witchcraft or the alignment of the stars. They responded with prayer and penance, astrological judgements and, at times, exclusion or flight—attempts to understand and control what they could not see. From a modern perspective, in which disease pathophysiology can be explained down to the molecular level, such interpretations and responses may seem almost absurd. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic that we have only just experienced reminds us that our fear of the ‘invisible’ has changed remarkably little. Ambient air pollution could well be considered one such ‘invisible’ threat. This is because, despite being entirely invisible—particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) particles, roughly the size of bacteria...