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Urban Neighbourhood Environments, Cardiometabolic Health and Cognitive Function: A National Cross-Sectional Study of Middle-Aged and Older Adults in Australia

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posted on 2022-06-24, 06:49 authored by E Cerin, A Barnett, Jonathan ShawJonathan Shaw, E Martino, LD Knibbs, Rachel ThamRachel Tham, AJ Wheeler, KJ Anstey
Population ageing and urbanisation are global phenomena that call for an understanding of the impacts of features of the urban environment on older adults’ cognitive function. Because neighbourhood characteristics that can potentially have opposite effects on cognitive function are interdependent, they need to be considered in conjunction. Using data from an Australian national sample of 4141 adult urban dwellers, we examined the extent to which the associations of interre-lated built and natural environment features and ambient air pollution with cognitive function are explained by cardiometabolic risk factors relevant to cognitive health. All examined environmental features were directly and/or indirectly related to cognitive function via other environmental features and/or cardiometabolic risk factors. Findings suggest that dense, interconnected urban environments with access to parks, blue spaces and low levels of air pollution may benefit cognitive health through cardiometabolic risk factors and other mechanisms not captured in this study. This study also high-lights the need for a particularly fine-grained characterisation of the built environment in research on cognitive function, which would enable the differentiation of the positive effects of destination-rich neighbourhoods on cognition via participation in cognition-enhancing activities from the negative effects of air pollutants typically present in dense, destination-rich urban areas.

Funding

This work was supported by a program grant ("The environment, active living and cognitive health: building the evidence base") from the Australian Catholic University [grant number ACURF18]. Jonathan E. Shaw is supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator Grant [grant number 1173952]. Kaarin J. Anstey is funded by an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship [grant number FL190100011].

History

Publication Date

2022-01-01

Journal

Toxics

Volume

10

Issue

1

Article Number

ARTN 23

Pagination

16p.

Publisher

MDPI

ISSN

2305-6304

Rights Statement

© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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