For many it was something that fell by its own weight, but now science corroborates it, children who go to schools with green areas have less attention problems and have a better school performance.
The study has been carried out during a year in which the performance of almost 2600 children has been observed, between seven and ten years of schooling in 36 schools in Barcelona and which has been carried out by the Research Center in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL), in Barcelona with the collaboration of researchers from the University of California (USA) and others European institutions. Now we will explain why Children have fewer school problems in "green" schools.
"Our conclusion is that more green areas must be created within and around schools," says Jordi Sunyer, author of the study.
According to the study, centers that have green areas or that are located near one have a lower percentage of attention problems in their students (up to 10% less).
Black Carbon
It is believed that the person responsible for the bad results is the so-called "black carbon" that occurs in the combustion of diesel engines and is believed to have some influence on the maturation and development of the brain in children.
“These particles measure less than 0.7 microns (one micron is one millionth of a meter), enter the bottom of the lung and become inflamed in the brain. Pollution would explain up to 50% of attention problems and 20% of problems in working memory (the mental processes to temporarily store information and manipulate it), ”says Sunyer.
What trees do is to counteract this contamination by fixing those particles.
An important issue for the future of our society
According to the study, the children analyzed who were enrolled in schools with fewer green areas had a 5% delay in cognitive development and that It is a very high percentage, the co-authors of the project confirm us.
The study has not detected any socioeconomic factor that has influenced the trial, since schools with more green areas are not precisely in the richest areas (the land in the latter is more expensive).
You hit the studio
Some of the weaknesses of this study is that a cause-effect relationship between contamination and performance has not been found, but only one possible link that will require future studies has been detected. Another point to note is that in the study the green areas have been measured by satellite but it has not been taken into account whether the small ones have entered them or not.
"We cannot be sure that the observed associations between cognitive development and green areas are not due to factors not considered by the authors"think Andy Jones, public health expert at the University of East Anglia (England), on the Science Media Center website.
We will have to wait for new studies that confirm, without a doubt, the relationship between pollution and brain development, but for now I do not think it is too much to ask for more green areas for our children.
