Are you feeling sluggish at work? The poor air quality has a significant role to play.

Air quality plays a key role in our health and not just in terms of the smog season. The air quality at work plays a key role in case you are feeling sluggish at office.

According to a study by Harvard scientists’ poor air quality inside an office can have a significant impact on employees’ cognitive function, including response times and ability to focus.

“We have a huge body of research on the exposure to outdoor pollution, but we spend 90 per cent of our time indoors,” Jose Guillermo Cedeno Laurent, a research fellow and lead author of the paper published Thursday in Environmental Research Letters, told AFP. He further added that the limited amount of prior studies on indoor settings had focused on measures like thermal comfort and satisfaction, rather than on cognitive outcomes.

Cedeno Laurent and colleagues designed a study that followed 302 office workers across six countries which included; China, India, Mexico, Thailand, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom, over a period of one year.

It ended in March 2020 when the covid-19 pandemic brought a global lockdowns.

All participants were aged between 18 and 65, working at least three days in an office building, and had a permanent workstation within the office.

The workspaces of the subjects were fitted with an environmental sensor to monitor real time concentrations of fine particulate matter 2.5 micrometers and smaller, PM2.5, as well as carbon dioxide, temperature, and relative humidity.

Then the participants were given a custom designed app for their mobile phones to carry out the cognitive tests. They were prompted to take the tests at prescheduled times or when the sensors detected PM2.5 and CO2 levels that fell below or exceeded certain thresholds.

CO2 concentrations served as a proxy for ventilation levels of the work space. Outside, concentrations are around 400 ppm (parts per million), while 1,000 ppm is cited as an upper limit for indoors.

Two tests were conducted. The first required employees to correctly identify the color of displayed words that spelled out another color. This evaluated cognitive speed and the ability to focus on relevant stimuli when irrelevant stimuli are being presented.

The second test involved basic addition and subtraction with two digit long numbers, to assess cognitive speed and working memory.

Results of these tests showed that an increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter of PM2.5 led to about a 1 per cent reduction in response times to both tests, and more than a 1 per cent reduction in accuracy.

For a frame of reference, the outdoor PM2.5 levels in the US capital Washington were 13.9 micrograms per cubic meter on Thursday, according to the IQAir tracking site, while it was 42 micrograms per cubic meter in New Delhi. In terms of C02, an increase of 500 ppm (parts per million), which is not an unusual level of variation, led to a more than one percent drop in response times, and more than two percent drop in accuracy across both tests.

While past studies have shown that prolonged exposure to PM2.5 inflames the central nervous system and crosses the blood-brain-barrier to cause long term neurodegenerative disease, this is the first to show short term effects.

For employees returning to in-person office work, there are some solutions. Opening a window is one, said Cedeno Laurent. If the outdoor air quality isn’t good, upgrading the building’s filtration systems or adding high quality portable air cleaners are good ideas.

Originally published at https://pk.mashable.com on September 10, 2021.