Light, Particulate Matter and ... Thyroid Cancer?

I’m your host, and today we’re talking about a new study that brings together two things we all encounter daily—air pollution and city lights—and links them to something unexpected and alarming: thyroid cancer in children.This study, titled “Perinatal Exposures to Ambient Fine Particulate Matter and Outdoor Artificial Light at Night and Risk of Pediatric Papillary Thyroid Cancer,” was just published in Environmental Health Perspectives on April 7, 2025. It’s led by Dr. Nicole Deziel of Yale University, along with a large team of researchers from Yale, the University of Southern California, UC Berkeley, and the American Cancer Society (Deziel et al., 2025).Their work investigates how exposure to fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) and artificial light at night—during the earliest stages of life—might raise the risk of thyroid cancer in children and teens.Let’s dive into what this means, how the study was done, and what we can all do in response.Contacts - feel free to reach out!Gmail - [email protected]/X - theenvironmentalreviewCitations:Nicole C. Deziel, Rong Wang, Joshua L. Warren, Catherine Dinauer, Jennifer Ogilvie, Cassandra J. Clark, Charlie Zhong, Joseph L. Wiemels, Libby Morimoto, Catherine Metayer, Xiaomei Ma. Perinatal Exposures to Ambient Fine Particulate Matter and Outdoor Artificial Light at Night and Risk of Pediatric Papillary Thyroid Cancer. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2025; DOI: 10.1289/EHP14849