BASE-II

The neighborhoods in which we live may impact our mental health as well as our brain structure and function. As individuals who often spend much of their time in their local neighborhood, older adults provide an interesting population for studying the relationships between local environments and mental health and the brain. At the Center for Environmental Neuroscience, we undertake the ongoing data collection of the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II), a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional longitudinal study that monitors how older individuals change with age across a broad spectrum of research domains. We currently collect data from the BASE-II participants, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), cognitive tests, and questionnaires about their home and neighborhood environments. We hope to understand how changes in the home address (and neighborhood) relate to changes in mental and brain health in older age.  

Literature 

Demuth, I. et al. (2019). Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II). In Gu, D., Dupre, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_27-1 

Kühn, S., Düzel, S., Eibich, P., Krekel, C., Wüstemann, H., Kolbe, J., Martensson, J., Goebel, J., Gallinat, J., Wagner, G. G., & Lindenberger, U. (2017). In search of features that constitute an “enriched environment” in humans: Associations between geographical properties and brain structure. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 11920. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-12046-7 

Kühn, S., Düzel, S., Mascherek, A., Eibich, P., Krekel, C., Kolbe, J., Goebel, J., Gallinat, J., Wagner, G. G., & Lindenberger, U. (2021). Urban green is more than the absence of city: Structural and functional neural basis of urbanicity and green space in the neighbourhood of older adults. Landscape and Urban Planning, 214, 104196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2021.104196