TY - JOUR
T1 - Coastal exposure and residents’ mental health in the affected areas by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami
AU - Tashiro, Ai
AU - Kogure, Mana
AU - Nagata, Shohei
AU - Itabashi, Fumi
AU - Tsuchiya, Naho
AU - Hozawa, Atsushi
AU - Nakaya, Tomoki
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project from the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED), the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), and Traffic and Medical Informatics in Disaster, Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization, Tohoku University. This work is also supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant 20H00040.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - No previous study has ever explored the association between coastal exposure and the mental health of residents in a post-disaster context. Therefore, we aimed to confirm whether there was an association between sea visibility and coastal proximity and the mental health of coastal residents a devastating tsunami. We targeted 15 coastal municipalities located in the Miyagi Prefecture, and obtained data from a community-based cohort study. The baseline survey was initiated 2 years after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami and the secondary survey was initiated 6 years after the disaster. We applied multilevel mixed-effects models to the longitudinal data. Our outcome measure was the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6) score. We assessed the data collected from 2,327 respondents on both surveys as of April 2018 for this ongoing cohort study. We found that neither sea visibility nor coastal proximity was significantly associated with the recovery of mental health after the disaster. However, we found a distinctive trend of mental health recovery in people who lived alone with a sea view, indicating that visibility of the sea had a negative effect on their mental health immediately after the GEJET, but that the negative effect was subsequently eliminated.
AB - No previous study has ever explored the association between coastal exposure and the mental health of residents in a post-disaster context. Therefore, we aimed to confirm whether there was an association between sea visibility and coastal proximity and the mental health of coastal residents a devastating tsunami. We targeted 15 coastal municipalities located in the Miyagi Prefecture, and obtained data from a community-based cohort study. The baseline survey was initiated 2 years after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami and the secondary survey was initiated 6 years after the disaster. We applied multilevel mixed-effects models to the longitudinal data. Our outcome measure was the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6) score. We assessed the data collected from 2,327 respondents on both surveys as of April 2018 for this ongoing cohort study. We found that neither sea visibility nor coastal proximity was significantly associated with the recovery of mental health after the disaster. However, we found a distinctive trend of mental health recovery in people who lived alone with a sea view, indicating that visibility of the sea had a negative effect on their mental health immediately after the GEJET, but that the negative effect was subsequently eliminated.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85113186805&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85113186805&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/s41598-021-96168-z
DO - 10.1038/s41598-021-96168-z
M3 - Article
C2 - 34408202
AN - SCOPUS:85113186805
SN - 2045-2322
VL - 11
JO - Scientific Reports
JF - Scientific Reports
IS - 1
M1 - 16751
ER -
