Abstract
Multiple environmental changes are related to mental disorders. However, research on the association between artificial light at night (ALAN) and mental health in China is limited, particularly at the national level. We used a “difference-in-differences” design and logistic regression to explore the relationship between ALAN changes and scores on self-assessed mental health. Participants were drawn from the China Family Panel Studies of adults in 2012 and 2018. The final analysis was based on 21,036 adults from 25 provinces throughout China. The brighter the ALAN, the worse was the mental health, and this connection was unaffected by particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) or temperature. ALAN sensitivity may differ among populations. Our findings suggest that exposure to brighter ALAN is associated significantly with worse mental health among Chinese adults. Environmental policies that reduce ALAN could improve the mental health of the Chinese public.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank all participants and administrators in this study.
Funding sources
This research was supported by the Key R&D Program of Ningxia Autonomous Region (2022BEG03106).
Data availability statement
The population data (CFPS) that support findings of this study are available from https://opendata.pku.edu.cn. The ALAN data that support the findings of this study are available from https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/YGIVCD. The PM2.5 data that support the findings of this study are available from https://sites.wustl.edu/acag/datasets/surface-pm2-5/. The temperature data that support the findings of this study are available from http://data.cma.cn
Code availability statement
The code that supports the findings of this study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Contributions
Zhenfan Yu: Data curation, Methodology, and Writing—original draft. Naifan Hu: Conceptualization, Data curation, and Writing—review & editing. Yurun Du: Software and Writing—review & editing. Huihui Wang: Formal analysis and Writing—review & editing. Lining Pu: Data curation and Writing—review& editing. Xue Zhang: Data curation. Degong Pan: Writing—review & editing. Xiaoxue He: Writing—review & editing. Jiangping Li: Supervision, Resources, Writing—review & editing, Project administration, and Funding acquisition
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The CFPS is a nationally representative, the biennial household survey that has been performed since 2010, organized by the Institute of Social Science Survey, Peking University. The Peking University Biomedical Ethics Review Committee provided ethical approval for the survey (Approval number: IRB00001052-14010).
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Fig. S1
Comparison of population characteristics between the total data (black groups) for 2012 and the data (gray groups) analyzed in this study. (PNG 359 kb)
Fig. S2
Different exposure time-window for outdoor light at light. The adjusted odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals for different lags are displayed. Q1: “feeling depressed”; Q2: “activities took effort”; Q3: “restless sleep”; Q4: “feeling lonely”; Q5: “feeling sad”; Q6: “did not enjoy life”. (PNG 227 kb)
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Yu, Z., Hu, N., Du, Y. et al. Association of outdoor artificial light at night with mental health among China adults: a prospective ecology study. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 82286–82296 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-21587-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-21587-y