Stressed in the City: How Urban Life May Change Your Brain when it comes to mental health, the urban lifestyle may not be such a good thing. City dwellers tend to be more stressed and have higher levels of mood disorders and psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia than those living in rural or suburban areas. And now researchers say they have uncovered certain changes in brain activity that could potentially help explain why. In an international study, researchers at University of Heidelberg and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute at McGill University report in the journal Nature that people who live or were raised in cities show distinct differences in activity in certain brain regions than those who aren’t city dwellers. Those who currently live in the city, for example, showed higher activation the amygdala, the brain region that regulates emotions such as anxiety and fear. The amygdala is most often called into action under situations of stress or threat, and the data suggest that city dwellers’ brains have a more sensitive, hair-trigger response to such situations, at least when compared with those living in the suburbs or more rural areas. The study also found that people who were raised in the city during their first 15 years of life were more likely to show increased activation in another brain region, a more global regulator of stress known as the anterior cingulate. In these individuals, the change appears to be more permanent than in people who move to cities later in life, says Jens Pruessner, director of aging and Alzheimer’s research at the Douglas Institute and one of the study’s co-authors, because it occurs during an important period of development. Living in the city during your early years “means you will become more alert to [stress] situations via the anterior cingulate for the rest of your life,” he says. The researchers came to their conclusions after conducting a stress test on volunteers while their brains were imaged with functional MRI to detect which areas of the brain were more or less active when the participants felt stressed. The stress was applied by asking people to solve difficult math problems, either under time pressure or while enduring criticism from researchers for their bad performance. ~ Alice Park, TIME.HealthLand (Read more: healthland.time/2011/06/22/stressed-in-the-city-how-urban-life-may-change-your-brain/#ixzz2XzFFcyJW)
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 13:00:19 +0000
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