Linking Surrounding Greenness and Schizophrenia using Remote Sensing

Abstract

With the globalization accompanied by rapid economic growth human society suffers increased psychological stress arisen from internally competitions The rapid progression of urbanization in each country worldwide produces more environmental pollution and unhealthy environment in urban cities that increases human mental burden partly due to lack of comforting channels Moreover climate change is an emerging issue which causes more frequent extreme weather events such as the extreme precipitation and heat waves driven by global warming This situation affects not only the ecosystem but also human health Recent studies indicate that the extreme weather may potentially affect mental health whereas some preliminary evidence suggests that forest and vegetation may alleviate the adverse effects driven by extreme weather though the findings are not conclusive Therefore it is important to utilize a well-designed study to further clarify the relationship between greenness and top three rank mental disorder in Taiwan Schizophrenia In this study we selected the whole Taiwan island as the study area Databases employed in this study including the incident cases of schizophrenia from 2000 to 2010 were obtained form Longitudinal Health Insurance Database (LHID) of the Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD); meteorological factors such as temperature precipitation solar radiation and humidity were acquired from the Central Weather Bureau; and the long-term Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) records serving as a surrogate of greenness was obtained from the US Geological Survey (USGS) The hot-spot analysis was used to examine the spatial clustering of schizophrenia within the island Cox proportional hazards model was utilized to assess the association between surrounding greenness and schizophrenia Parameter estimates from various buffer size of greenness estimations were compared for the sensitivity test Then insurance amount and age were used as the stratification variables stratifying the entirety of the data into several groups by the tertile and median of the two variables respectively such as young people/middle aged people/elderly and poorer/richer people The results were then applied to assess the effect of these different strata of people on greenness effects The results indicated that the prevalence of schizophrenia showed an increasing trend over the study period Hot-spot analysis showed that hot spot zones of schizophrenia were found in Yilan City Hualien City and Kaohsiung City in 2000 The centers were then expanded to Yilan City New Taipei City Taichung City Hualien City and Kaohsiung City in 2010 As for the results of statistical analysis after adjustments for the available demographic social-economic and meteorological factors the coefficients of surround greenness showed a significantly (p

Date of Award	2015 Sept 4
Original language	English
Supervisor	Huey-Jen Jenny Su (Supervisor)