Health Benefits from Nature Experiences Depend on Dose
By Danielle F. Shanahan, R. Bush, Kevin J. Gaston, B. Lin, Julie H. Dean, Elizabeth Barber, Richard A. Fuller. Scientific Reports, 2016
701 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Nature within cities will have a central role in helping address key global public health challenges associated with urbanization. However, there is almost no guidance on how much or how frequently people need to engage with nature, and what types or characteristics of nature need to be incorporated in cities for the best health outcomes. Here we use a nature dose framework to examine the associations between the duration, frequency and intensity of exposure to nature and health in an urban population. We show that people who made long visits to green spaces had lower rates of depression and high blood pressure, and those who visited more frequently had greater social cohesion. Higher levels of physical activity were linked to both duration and frequency of green space visits. A dose-response analysis for depression and high blood pressure suggest that visits to outdoor green spaces of 30 minutes or more during the course of a week could reduce the population prevalence of these illnesses by up to 7% and 9% respectively. Given that the societal costs of depression alone in Australia are estimated at AUD$12.6 billion per annum, savings to public health budgets across all health outcomes could be immense.
Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Speech and Hearing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0f22e14a63b8c1a6029dd76ea661aab24b2c3d2
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Citations in the corpus
- Predictors of Nature Connection Among Urban Residents: Assessing the Role of Childhood and Adult Nature Experiences (2018, background): “That said, it is recognized that Brisbane, the setting of this study, is considered to have a high level of urban nature (Shanahan et al., 2016), and that the satisfaction with and accessibility of nature at the city”
- Usage and perception of urban green space of older adults in the high-density city of Hong Kong (2021, background): “It improves the environmental quality of urban areas by regulating microclimate and reducing heat stress (Bowler et al., 2010; Shashua-Bar et al., 2010), reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide (Nowak et al.”
- Nature Contact and Human Health: A Research Agenda (2017, background): “What dose of nature is needed to optimize benefits (Hunter and Askarinejad 2015; Shanahan et al. 2015a, 2016)?”
- Nature contact and mood benefits: contact duration and mood type (2018, background): “For instance, the other aspects of Shanahan et al.’s (2015) dose-response elements can be examined using short exposure times while manipulating types of nature contact (e.”
- Landscapes for play: Effects of an intervention to promote nature-based risky play in early childhood centres (2017, background): “A greater dose of nature is associated with more benefits (Shanahan et al., 2016).”
- Nature contact, nature connectedness and associations with health, wellbeing and pro-environmental behaviours (2020, background): “, 2016; Gascón, Zijlema, Vert, White, & Nieuwenhuijsen, 2017; van den Bosch & Sang, 2017), and b) spending recreational time in nature and positive health and wellbeing (Shanahan et al., 2016; White et al., 2019), the relationships between nature contact and pro-environmental behaviour are far less ”
- Exploring potential mechanisms involved in the relationship between eudaimonic wellbeing and nature connection (2017, positive): “27 of nature’ to target adult populations (Shanahan et al., 2016).”