"Urban-Satellite" estimates in the ABCD Study: Linking Neuroimaging and Mental Health to Satellite Imagery Measurements of Macro Environmental Factors

Closing the loop between environment, brain and mental health: how far we might go in real-life assessments?

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

Environmental factors such as climate, urbanicity, and exposure to nature are becoming increasingly important influencers of mental health. Incorporating data gathered from real-life contexts holds promise to substantially enhance laboratory experiments by providing a more comprehensive understanding of everyday behaviors in natural environments. We provide an up-to-date review of current technological and methodological developments in mental health assessments, neuroimaging and environmental sensing.

RECENT FINDINGS

Mental health research progressed in recent years towards integrating tools, such as smartphone based mental health assessments or mobile neuroimaging, allowing just-in-time daily assessments. Moreover, they are increasingly enriched by dynamic measurements of the environment, which are already being integrated with mental health assessments. To ensure ecological validity and accuracy it is crucial to capture environmental data with a high spatio-temporal granularity. Simultaneously, as a supplement to experimentally controlled conditions, there is a need for a better understanding of cognition in daily life, particularly regarding our brain's responses in natural settings.

SUMMARY

The presented overview on the developments and feasibility of "real-life" approaches for mental health and brain research and their potential to identify relationships along the mental health-environment-brain axis informs strategies for real-life individual and dynamic assessments.

Building towards an adolescent neural urbanome: Expanding environmental measures using linked external data (LED) in the ABCD study

Many recent studies have demonstrated that environmental contexts, both social and physical, have an important impact on child and adolescent neural and behavioral development. The adoption of geospatial methods, such as in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, has facilitated the exploration of many environmental contexts surrounding participants' residential locations without creating additional burdens for research participants (i.e., youth and families) in neuroscience studies. However, as the number of linked databases increases, developing a framework that considers the various domains related to child and adolescent environments external to their home becomes crucial. Such a framework needs to identify structural contextual factors that may yield inequalities in children's built and natural environments; these differences may, in turn, result in downstream negative effects on children from historically minoritized groups. In this paper, we develop such a framework - which we describe as the "adolescent neural urbanome" - and use it to categorize newly geocoded information incorporated into the ABCD Study by the Linked External Data (LED) Environment & Policy Working Group. We also highlight important relationships between the linked measures and describe possible applications of the Adolescent Neural Urbanome. Finally, we provide a number of recommendations and considerations regarding the responsible use and communication of these data, highlighting the potential harm to historically minoritized groups through their misuse.