Coastal exposure and residents’ mental health in the affected areas by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

Abstract

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.

Association between physiological factors and grip and leg extension strength for predicting health outcomes: Tohoku Medical Megabank Community-based cohort study

“…This cross-sectional study used data from the Tohoku Medical Megabank Community-Based Cohort Study, a population-based prospective cohort study of individuals aged ≥ 20 years in Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. Details of recruitment have been described previously [16].…”

Linking affected community and academic knowledge: community-based research for the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake

“…Globally, the importance of and need for community-based research is increasingly recognized in the context of disasters such as Iraq con ict [6], landslides [7], oods [8], hurricanes [9][10][11], and bush res [12,13]. By contrast, in the Japanese context, awareness of the importance of CBPR has increased since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake [14,15] and has been reported in relation to the Kumamoto earthquake [16] and oods [17] (Fig. 1A).…”