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空气污染会导致肥胖和糖尿病(中英双语)

青岛希尼尔翻译咨询有限公司(www.sinosenior.com)整理发布  2015-12-10

  

青岛希尼尔翻译公司(www.sinosenior.com)2015年12月10日了解到:一些令人困惑的研究表明空气中的微小悬浮颗粒可导致肥胖、糖尿病和心脏病。是否应该引起我们的关注?Some puzzling studies appear to show that tiny airborne particles may contribute to obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Should we be concerned?
  Take a deep breath, and exhale. Depending on where you live, that life-giving lungful of air might just be pushing you towards diabetes and obesity.
  由于生存环境的不同,维持生命的呼吸可能会使你患上糖尿病或者肥胖。
  The idea that “thin air” can make you fat sounds ludicrous, yet some extremely puzzling studies appear to be showing that it’s possible. Two people can eat the same foods, and do the same exercise, but over the course of a few years, one may put on more weight and develop a faulty metabolism – thanks to the atmosphere around their home.
  “虚无的空气”会导致肥胖的观点听起来有些荒唐,然而一些令人非常困惑的研究显示这是很有可能的。两个饮食和锻炼相同的人,几年后其中一个可能会出现肥胖和新陈代谢问题,这就是他们家周围的大气造成的。
  Traffic fumes and cigarette smoke are the chief concerns, with their tiny, irritating particles that trigger widespread inflammation and disrupt the body’s ability to burn energy. While the short-term effects are minimal, over a lifetime it could be enough to contribute to serious disease – besides the respiratory illnesses more commonly associated with smog. “We are starting to understand that the uptake and circulation of air pollution in the body can affect more than just the lungs,” says Hong Chen at the University of Toronto, Canada.
  首 先要关注的是汽车尾气和香烟,微小的刺激性颗粒会引起大范围的炎症并扰乱身体燃烧能量的机制。虽然短期的影响很小,但在一生中除了会造成雾霾直接相关的呼 吸道疾病之外,还会造成一些严重的疾病。加拿大多伦多大学的陈红说:“我们逐渐了解到体内吸入污染的空气还会造成肺部以外的影响。”
  How strong is the evidence from these studies, and should you be concerned?
  这些研究的证据是否可靠,你是否会关注?
  Laboratory mice offered some of the earliest concrete clues that the effects of air pollution may penetrate far beyond the lungs. Their breeder at the Ohio State University, Qinghua Sun, had been interested in studying why city-dwellers seem to be at a particularly high risk of heart disease compared to country folk. Lifestyle, of course, could be one reason: in most major cities a fast food chain is rarely more than a block away, for instance, which might encourage unhealthy eating. Nevertheless, he wondered if another answer may be hanging, invisibly, in the air we breathe.
  实验室小白鼠最先提供的证据表明空气污染的远远 不止对肺部有影响。这些小白鼠的饲养员,俄亥俄州立大学的孙庆华对城市居民患心脏病的风险比农村高这方面的研究很感兴趣。当然,生活方式也是一个重要的原 因,例如多数大城市的众多快餐连锁店也会导致不健康饮食。然而,他想弄清呼吸的空气中是否有其他的答案。
  To find out more, he started to raise laboratory mice in the kinds of conditions you might find across various cities. Some breathed filtered, clean, air, while others were funnelled the kinds of fumes you might find next to a motorway or busy city centre. Along the way, his team weighed the mice and performed various tests to study how their metabolism was functioning.
  为了找到更多的证据,他开始在实验室里以不同城市的环境下饲养小白鼠。一些小白鼠呼吸过滤的干净空气,而另一些呼吸公路上或者繁忙市中心的污染空气。他们的团队在整个过程中对小白鼠称重和进行各种不同的测试,来研究小白鼠的新陈代谢是否正常。
  After just 10 weeks, the effects were already visible. The mice exposed to the air pollution showed greater volumes of body fat, both around the belly and around the internal organs; at the microscopic level, the fat cells themselves were around 20% larger in the mice inhaling a fine mist of pollutants. What’s more, they seemed to have become less sensitive to insulin, the hormone that signals to cells to convert blood sugar into energy: the first step towards diabetes.
  10 周后影响就非常明显,呼吸污染空气的小白鼠体内脂肪,包括腹部脂肪和内部器官上的脂肪都比呼吸干净空气的小白鼠多。通过显微镜观察,呼吸污染空气的小白鼠 的脂肪细胞要大20%。而且,看起来对胰岛素更加不敏感,这是糖尿病发展的第一步,胰岛素是一种向细胞发送信号把血糖转化为能量的激素。
  The exact mechanism is still debated, but subsequent animal experiments suggest the air pollution triggers a cascade of reactions in the body. Small particles, less than 2.5 micrometres wide, are thought to be primarily to blame – the same minuscule motes of pollutant that give city air its gauzy haze. When we breathe in, the pollutants irritate the tiny, moist air sacs that normally allow the oxygen to pass into the blood stream. As a result, the lungs’ lining mounts a stress response, sending our nervous system into overdrive. This includes the release of hormones that reduce insulin’s potency and draws blood away from the insulin-sensitive muscle tissue, preventing the body from tightly controlling its blood sugar levels.
  虽 然准确机制还有待于讨论,但随后的实验表明空气污染造成了大量的体内反应。2.5微米以下的小颗粒可能是主要原因,这样的污染物小颗粒构成了城市里的雾 霾。呼吸时这些污染物会刺激氧气交换的肺泡,肺部做出紧急响应,向神经系统发送紧张信号,包括释放降低胰岛素的荷尔蒙,减少胰岛素敏感肌肉组织的供血,影 响了严格控制体内血糖水平。
  The tiny irritating particles may also unleash a flood of inflammatory molecules called “cytokines” to wash through the blood, a response that also triggers immune cells to invade otherwise healthy tissue. Not only does that too interfere with the tissue’s ability to respond to insulin; the subsequent inflammation may also interfere with the hormones and the brain processing that govern our appetite, says Michael Jerrett at the University of California, Berkeley.
  伯克利加州大学的麦克杰瑞特说,微小的刺激颗粒也会造成向血液中释放细胞活素类炎症细胞,也是触发免疫细胞防止侵害监控组织的一种响应。这样不仅过度的干涉组织响应胰岛素的能力,随之而来的炎症也会影响荷尔蒙和大脑控制饥饿的能力。
  All of which knocks the body’s energy balance off-kilter, leading to a constellation of metabolic disorders, including diabetes and obesity, and cardiovascular problems such as hypertension.
  这些因素造成肌体的能量失衡,导致大量的新陈代谢失调,包括糖尿病和肥胖,以及高血压等心血管问题。
  Large studies from cities across the world suggest that humans might be suffering the same consequences. Chen, for instance, examined the medical records of 62,000 people in Ontario, Canada over a 14-year period. He found that the risk of developing diabetes rose by about 11% for every 10 micrograms of fine particles in a cubic metre of air – a troubling statistic, considering that the pollution in some Asian cities can reach at least 500 micrograms per cubic metre of air. Across the Atlantic, a Swiss study saw a similar signs of increased insulin resistance, hypertension, and waist-circumference in a sample of nearly 4,000 people living among dense pollution.
  大 量来自全球的研究表明,人类可能会受到同样的影响。例如陈先生研究了14年间加拿大安大略省62000人的医学记录,发现每立方空气中的微小颗粒每增加 10毫克,患糖尿病的风险增加11%。考虑到在亚洲一些城市每立方空气中的污染物超过500毫克,这项统计令人担忧。瑞士在对生活在重污染区的4000人 的研究中发现了类似的结果,胰岛素抗性增加、高血压和腰围增加。
  The scientists have been particularly concerned about the effects on young children, with some concern that a mother’s exposure to these pollutants may alter the baby’s metabolism so they are more prone to obesity. Consider the work of Andrew Rundle at Columbia University, who studied children growing up in the Bronx. During pregnancy, the children’s mothers had worn a small backpack that measured the air quality as they went about their daily business, and over the next seven years the children’s health was monitored at regular intervals. Controlling for other factors (such as wealth and diet), the children born in the most polluted areas were 2.3 times more likely to be considered obese, compared to those living in cleaner neighbourhoods.
  科 学家特别关注空气污染对儿童青少年的影响,以及通过孕妇影响婴儿的新陈代谢,使他们更容易肥胖。哥伦比亚大学的Andrew Rundle研究怀孕期间在布朗克斯长大的儿童,孕妇在她们的日常工作环境中带一个监测空气质量的背包,并在以后的七年中定期监控儿童的健康。控制其他因 素(例如家境和饮食),跟生活在清洁环境中的儿童相比,生活在污染区的儿童患肥胖的概率高2.3倍。
  Jerrett, meanwhile, has found that the risk can come from inside as well as outside the home: parental smoking, he showed, also led to faster weight gain among Californian children and teens. “It interacts synergistically with the effect of the air pollution,” he says – in other words, the combined risk was far greater than the sum of individual risks.
  同时,杰瑞特也发现污染影响可能在室内,也可能在室外。在加利福尼亚,父母吸烟的儿童和青少年体重也会增加的更快,这跟空气污染的效果有协同作用。换而言之,综合风险比单一风险影响更大。
  Despite these troubling findings, we should be cautious about reading too much into them. “They only draw a link between exposure and outcome, but can’t prove that one factor causes another,” says Abby Fleisch at Harvard Medical School. Even so, her own findings would seem to agree with the general trend – she has shown that even in the first six months, babies of mothers living in polluted areas appear to put on weight more rapidly than those in cleaner areas – but she stresses that we still can’t be sure we haven’t neglected some other factor, besides pollution, that could explain the apparent link.
  虽 然这些发现令人头疼,阅读时还是要采取谨慎的态度。哈佛医学院的Abby Fleisch说,这些研究只展示了受到空气污染和结果之间的联系,并没有证明这些原因直接导致了结果。尽管如此,她自己的发现似乎也跟总体趋势一致,她 发现即使在前六个月中母亲生活在污染区的儿童体重也是增加的更快,但是她强调不能保证没有漏掉空气污染之外密切相关的其他因素。
  Fortunately, a few teams are already searching for the missing pieces to fill those gaps in our knowledge with more detailed studies. Robert Brook at the University of Michigan and colleagues in China, for instance, recently tested a small group of subjects in Beijing over a two-year period. They found that whenever the city’s infamous smog descended, giveaway signs of developing problems like insulin resistance and hypertension peaked – providing more concrete evidence that the air quality was indeed driving changes to the metabolism.
  幸好有一些研究小组已经通过详细的研究填补了这方面知识的空白,例如,密歇根大学的罗伯特布鲁克和中国的同事最近对北京一小组实验对象进行了为期两年的测试,发现雾霾发生时,抗胰岛素性和高血压等问题会增加,为空气质量影响新陈代谢提供了更确凿的证据。
  If the link is proven, how concerned should we be? The scientists stress that the individual, short-term risk to any one person is relatively small, and certainly shouldn’t be used as an excuse for obesity by itself, without considering other aspects of your lifestyle. But given the sheer number of people living in cities with high pollution, over the long term the total number of casualties could be enormous. “Everyone is affected by pollution to some degree,” says Brook. “It’s continuous, involuntary exposure, across billions of people – so the overall impact becomes much greater.”
  如 果证明了这之间的联系,我们应该如何关注这件事?科学家强调对人的短期风险相对很小,当然不能当做造成肥胖的原因,而不考虑生活方式的其他方面。但是对生 活在污染严重城市的广大群体的长期影响是巨大的。布鲁克说每个人都受到某种程度的污染,这是几十亿人不由自主的受到连续污染,因此整体的影响就更大了。
  The solutions are familiar, if difficult to implement: restrict traffic pollution by promoting electric and hybrid vehicles, for instance. Jerrett suggests streets could also be redesigned to reduce the exposure to pedestrians and cyclists. In the short term, he points out that air purifiers could be added to more homes, schools and offices to filter out some of the harmful particles.
  即便难以实施,解决方案都类似:例如,通过推广电动和混动汽车限制交通污染。杰瑞特建议重新设计街道减少对步行和骑车人们的污染,还指出可在家里、学校和办公室中使用空气净化器过滤掉有害颗粒物。
  Brook agrees that action needs to be taken internationally, both in the developing world and in cities like Paris and London that superficially, might seem to have their pollution under control. “In North America and Europe the pollution levels have been trending in right direction – but we shouldn’t rest on our laurels,” he says. “From the standpoint of improving health across the world, it should be one of our top 10 worries.”
  布鲁克认同需要全球采取措施的观点,例如巴黎和伦敦这样的发达国家大都市可能会控制污染。北美和欧洲的污染控制发展趋势良好,但是我们不能只唱赞歌,改善全世界人类的健康应该是重中之重。
  来源:BBC News


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