Health outcome · symptom
Cognitive dysfunction
Also: cognitive impairment, cognitive decline, cognitive disorder, mild cognitive impairment
Measurable impairment of memory, attention or executive function, short of dementia and detected by testing rather than by diagnosis. It covers both the transient decline seen within a stuffy room and the persistent decline studied in older people.
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
Two timescales sit under one name and they should not be read as one finding.
The short one is reversible. In chamber and classroom studies, decision-making and concentration fall as a room’s air goes stale and recover when it is ventilated; this is measured as cognitive performance on a task, with carbon dioxide standing as the indicator of how much air is being shared.
The long one is not reversible. Cohorts of older adults find lower test scores and faster decline where households cook and heat with solid fuel or report persistent damp, with inflammation and vascular injury as the proposed route. These studies measure a state of the person, not a state of the room.
Coridum keeps them under separate slugs deliberately: a test score that improves when a window is opened says nothing about the trajectory of a brain over twenty years.
Indoor factors with evidence
| Factor | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coal | HR 1.249 (1.061–1.470) | — · home | prospective cohort of older adults: the household cooking fuel related to cognitive decline over follow-up, with social engagement tested as a modifier | F-1689 Household fuel use, social engagement, and cognitive decline… (2026) | machine |
| Biomass fuel | HR 1.062 (0.944–1.194) | — · home | prospective cohort of older adults: the household cooking fuel related to cognitive decline over follow-up, with social engagement tested as a modifier | F-1690 Household fuel use, social engagement, and cognitive decline… (2026) | machine |
| Mould | OR 3.09 (0.98–9.70) | older adults (median age 69 years) · dwelling | matched case-control study (1:1) of 60 older adults with amnestic mild cognitive impairment from the INTERCOG study and 60 population controls matched by sex, age and neighbourhood (Colombia): housing characterisation, NIOSH Dampness and Mold Assessment Tool, air culture samples from bedroom, living room and kitchen, indoor CO2, humidity, temperature and mould-specific IgE, conditional logistic regression | F-0593 Rivera-Carvajal Association between environmental mold exposure and mild cog… (2026) | machine |
| Mould | OR 1.40 (1.25–1.57) | — · home | cross-sectional analysis of a national cohort of older adults: indoor musty odour reported by the household related to cognitive impairment, with stratified and interaction analyses | F-1686 Association between indoor musty odors and cognitive impairm… (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
- D060825
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Cognitive dysfunction. Coridum Knowledge G-0158, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0158/