Triguero-Mas Donaire-Gonzalez Seto 2017

The Positive Health Effects on the Natural Outdoor environment in TYPical populations of different regions in Europe (PHENOTYPE) project aimed to investigate some of the mechanisms underpinning the commonly observed NOE-health relationships (Nieuwenhuijsen et al.,2014). PHENOTYPE collected data from four European cities: Barcelona (Spain), Stoke-on-Trent (United Kingdom), Doetinchem (The Netherlands) and Kaunas (Lithuania). Cities were selected to represent different European regions. 

The PHENOTYPE project examined how natural outdoor environments affect health by investigating the underlying mechanisms using data collected from four cities in different European regions—Barcelona (Spain), Stoke-on-Trent (UK), Doetinchem (the Netherlands), and Kaunas (Lithuania).

This study aimed to explore: (i) the associations between NOE exposure (including both residential availability and contact with NOE) and mental health; (ii) whether these relationships were modified by gender, age, education, and city; and (iii) whether stress, social contacts or physical activity mediated these associations.

This study looked at how access to and contact with natural outdoor environments (NOE) relate to mental health. It also explored whether these links differ by gender, age, education, or city, and if they can be explained by stress, social contacts, or physical activity.

However, only contact with surrounding greenness (rather than specific green/blue spaces) was

statistically significantly associated to better mental health across all the indicators (Fig. 1). In particular, the rate of sleeping well was 92% higher in those with surrounding greenness contact compared to people without contact with surrounding greenness.

Among all the factors, only contact with greenness is associated with better mental health. Even for people who have access to greenness, better sleep is observed in those who actually have contact with the surrounding greenness.

We found that contact with NOE, particularly when measured using surrounding greenness, was tied to better mental health. There was no association with residential availability of NOE.

The study found that in order to have better mental health, simply having a natural outdoor environment is not enough. It is the actual contact with the NOE that leads to better mental health

Future studies should investigate if the findings from this study can be applied to regions outside Europe and discuss the mechanism behind the difference, if any, between the different regions.

My lack of background in statistics leads to the difficulty to grasp the actual meaning of statistical analysis done in the paper. I can only understand the interpretation given by the paper but not the numbers themselves.