Emerging directions in the study of the environmental determinants of mental health: commentary on the MINDMAP Project.

The study of environmental determinants of health is at a crossroads. Harmonised health data across cohorts followed over decades, novel technologies to gather information on health behaviours and location data, and high-resolution spatial data on environmental factors have made it possible for researchers to unearth insights and relationships never before possible. This special issue of Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health brings findings from collaborators in the MINDMAP Project, an ambitious effort to examine the environmental determinants of mental health and well-being in older populations across Europe and Canada. The investigators involved in these studies have developed multiple high-resolution spatial datasets to examine a broad range of environmental factors, including area-level socioeconomic measures, crime, the built environment, green spaces and noise. In addition, the MINDMAP collaboration enables validated and harmonised measures of mental health and well-being, including loneliness, depressive symptoms, antidepressant use, anxiety, affect and mental distress. But the true strength of the MINDMAP collaboration is the potential for innovation by applying diverse study designs, ranging from mobile health approaches to agent-based modelling, to answer questions about how environmental factors drive healthy ageing. The findings presented unearth insights into potential environmental drivers of healthy ageing. Wey et al provide an overview of the MINDMAP Project, which used longitudinal data from six cohort studies located in Eastern and Western Europe, as well as Canada, that comprised a total of 220 621 participants. Baseline years of these studies ranged from 1984 to 2012, with up to seven repeated data collection periods. Looking across these studies, the investigators harmonised data on 1848 environmental exposures and 993 individual-level determinants and health outcomes. The domains covered by these rich harmonised data include physical environments, sociodemographic factors, health behaviours, disease status, medication use, cognitive functioning, psychological assessments and social networks. The resulting harmonised multinational dataset was transparently …