Temperature-related climate change impacts on neurodegenerative diseases: Systematic review

Climate Change poses one of the main challenges for humanity, whose impacts are wide and might be felt in areas such as human health. In this portrait, temperature implications on neurodegenerative conditions - such as Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease and Motor Neuron Diseases - must be better understood. Thus, the present Systematic Review was performed by accessing the databases PubMed Central (PMC), Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (Medline), Cochrane Library, Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (Lilacs), Scopus, and Embase. From the 325 papers initially identified in the field, 8 were finally selected, with the risk of bias analyzed with Cochrane’s ROBINS-E-tool. The conclusions, even though with different focus adopted by the original works, pointed that extreme heat events might worsen clinical outcomes in neurodegenerative diseases by mechanisms such as oxidative stress, neuroinflammation and, in the case of cold, changes in the phosphorylation of the Tau protein, also signaling the need for novel studies to further evaluate these findings and the public health urgency for dealing with climate change.