New research from the Healthy Buildings team led by Dr. Anna Young found that indoor dust mimics sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone when it gets into our cells.
Every day, we unknowingly breathe in and ingest dust that accumulates inside our buildings. In our study, we found that Human cells exposed to the dust samples acted as if they had too much estrogen and too little of other hormones like testosterone and thyroid hormone, which could disrupt delicate processes in the body that control sexual development, fertility, and successful birth.
This wasn’t a one-off result – we saw hormonal activity happen with every single dust sample we collected from 46 different rooms. You can read more about the study in this Harvard news story here.