The relationship between urbanization, the brain, and human mental health is subject to intensive debate in the current scientific literature. Particularly, since mood and anxiety disorders as well as schizophrenia are known to be more frequent in urban compared to rural regions.

Here, we investigated the association between cerebral signatures, mental health and land use indicators (Urban Fabric and Urban Green) within a 1 km radius around the home address of 207 well-characterized older adults.

We observed a negative association between Urban Fabric coverage and a positive association between Urban Green coverage and grey matter volume in perigenual/subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (p/sACC). Although p/sACC has repeatedly been associated with depressive symptoms, neither brain structure nor land use categories were related to measures of mental health. However, resting-state measure in p/sACC showed a negative association with Urban Fabric in our healthy sample, reminiscent of previous reports on major depression where p/sACC is often found to be reduced in activation. Interestingly, hierarchical regression analyses showed that Urban Green accounted for additional variance in brain structure beyond Urban Fabric. We take this finding as an exploratory result that hints at potentially salutogenic elements of green spaces (e.g. terpenes, nature sounds) that go beyond the absence of the detrimental elements of urban contexts (e.g. traffic noise, air pollution), which may inform the future search of environmental factors affecting mental health and disease.

城市化、大脑和人类心理健康之间的关系在当前的科学文献中引起了激烈的争论。特别是，由于众所周知，与农村地区相比，城市地区的情绪和焦虑症以及精神分裂症更为常见。

在这里，我们调查了 207 名特征明确的老年人的家庭住址周围 1 公里半径内的大脑特征、心理健康和土地利用指标（城市结构和城市绿色）之间的关联。

我们观察到 Urban Fabric 覆盖率呈负相关，而 Urban Green 覆盖率与膝周/膝下前扣带回皮层 (p/sACC) 灰质体积呈正相关。尽管 p/sACC 一再与抑郁症状相关，但大脑结构和土地利用类别均与心理健康指标无关。然而，在我们的健康样本中，p/sACC 的静息状态测量显示与 Urban Fabric 呈负相关，这让人想起之前关于重度抑郁症的报告，其中经常发现 p/sACC 激活减少。有趣的是，层次回归分析表明，城市绿化占了额外的超越城市结构的大脑结构差异。我们将这一发现作为一个探索性结果，暗示绿色空间的潜在健康元素（例如萜烯、自然声音）超出了城市环境的有害元素（例如交通噪音、空气污染）的缺失，这可能会为未来提供信息寻找影响心理健康和疾病的环境因素。