RESEARCH
Outdoor Green Space Exposure and Brain Health Measures Related to Alzheimer’s Disease: A Rapid Review
Summary
This article is a rapid review, which is a way to quickly look at the research that’s already been done on a specific topic. The author wanted to understand what studies have said about whether being around outdoor green spaces, like parks and gardens, is linked to brain health in ways that relate to Alzheimer’s disease and similar conditions. To do this, the researcher looked through three big collections of scientific articles for studies published up to February 2020. They focused on studies that looked at individuals and their brain health through things like memory tests, doctor’s diagnoses of dementia, and brain scans. The reviewer didn’t include studies that weren’t in English, looked at short-term mental states like tiredness, or used average scores for groups of people instead of individual results.
The review found 22 studies that met the criteria, and most of them were published in recent years. These studies looked at people of all ages, from children to older adults, in different parts of the world. The way “green space” was measured varied, but often it involved looking at satellite images to see how much healthy plant life was in an area. Similarly, the ways brain health was measured differed across the studies, including various cognitive tests and MRI scans. The author noted that most of the studies used statistical methods to account for other factors like age and socioeconomic status.
