YUCA: Youth in Urban Centres across the Americas: Understanding and addressing heat impacts on mental health

This project will characterise mechanisms at the environmental, social, physiological, and biological levels linking heat exposure to mental health among urban youth (16-35 years) in the Americas. We will establish longitudinal cohorts of youth experiencing at least mild symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychosis and who may benefit from mental health care in Montréal (Canada), Querétaro (Mexico), and Buenos Aires (Argentina). We will monitor temperature exposure, primary outcomes of anxiety, depression, and psychosis symptoms, secondary mental health outcomes, and a range of potential mechanisms, including air pollution and other environmental factors, social isolation, cognition, sleep, physical activity, cardiovascular health, psychotropic medication use, brain function and tissue properties, and demographic characteristics. We will develop a rodent model of heat stress to causally examine the relationship between heat exposure, brain volume and tissue properties, and depression and anxiety using longitudinal imaging and cellular assays. We will adapt existing mental health services to integrate intervention components that protect mental health in the context of heat and have been co-designed with youth. Our project will generate novel datasets from middle- and high-income countries across diverse contexts for systematic examination of heat exposure, mental health outcomes, and potential mechanisms from the cellular to population levels.