Health outcome · disease
Anxiety
Also: anxiety symptoms, anxiety disorder, generalised anxiety, nervousness
Persistent worry, tension and apprehension, measured in population research by validated symptom scales. It appears in indoor air research alongside depression, usually in the same studies and with the same difficulty in separating exposure from circumstance.
Not reviewed by a clinician. This entry describes a disease or a symptom. We are introducing clinical review for pages of this kind; until that reviewer is in place, this page has been written and checked by the Coridum team but not reviewed by a clinician. It is general information and not medical advice. How this library is built is described in How we build this library.
Why it matters indoors
Anxiety and depression are measured together, correlate strongly, and are affected by the same housing conditions, so the caution needed for one applies to the other: a household living with visible damp, cold or smoke is usually living with other difficulties as well, and a symptom scale registers the whole of it.
What makes the outcome worth recording separately is that the two do not always move together. In the studies of older adults where a household exposure is tested against several mental health outcomes at once, the association with anxiety has sometimes been the stronger one — which is informative, because a purely reporting-driven artefact would be expected to move both scales equally.
A specific mechanism is also possible and specific to this outcome. Carbon monoxide at low chronic concentrations produces symptoms that resemble anxiety closely enough to be mistaken for it, which belongs in any assessment before the association is read as psychological.
Indoor factors with evidence
| Factor | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mould | OR 2.11 (1.80–2.48) | — · home | cross-sectional analysis of a national cohort of older adults: self-reported mold exposure at home and the fuel used for cooking related to depression and anxiety, with adjusted odds ratios | F-1593 Ma Association of mold exposure and solid household fuel use wi… (2025) | machine |
| Solid fuel | OR 1.31 (1.12–1.52) | — · home | cross-sectional analysis of a national cohort of older adults: self-reported mold exposure at home and the fuel used for cooking related to depression and anxiety, with adjusted odds ratios | F-1595 Ma Association of mold exposure and solid household fuel use wi… (2025) | machine |
| Mould | OR 2.12 (1.78–2.53) | — · home | cross-sectional analysis of a national cohort of older adults: indoor musty odour reported by the household related to depression and anxiety symptoms, with adjustment for confounders | F-1688 Associations of indoor musty odors with depression and anxie… (2025) | machine |
Each row is one Finding — a sentence as printed in one study, recorded with its page in the Coridum Knowledge Base. Follow the Finding number for the exact wording and the citation. Checked says who verified the row: machine means every automatic check passed and the surrounding text was read; person means someone read the sentence in the document. Rows are re-checked by a person over time. The studies are curated in the Coridum Knowledge Base; the reading of them together is a Claim, shown separately.
Identifiers
- MeSH
- D001007
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Anxiety. Coridum Knowledge G-0170, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0170/