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Walking Green: Developing an Evidence-base for Nature Prescriptions

NCT03442998 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 24

Last updated 2019-11-01

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

The investigators hypothesize that walking on a nature trail will lead to greater reductions in stress and greater improvements in the capacity to direct attention as compared to walking on a suburban sidewalk.

The effects of walking in these different locations will be measured using physiological and psychological outcomes. The study design is a randomized with-in person cross-over trial. Subjects will take six 50-minute walks, one walk per week for six weeks. Three walks will occur in the urban setting and three in the nature setting. The order of the conditions will be randomly assigned to each subject, so that half of the subjects will complete the urban walks first and half the subjects will complete the nature walks first. There will be a two-week washout period between the two sets of walks. Day of the week will be fixed within person, and walks will occur during the mild weather months. In the case of inclement weather, the weekly walk will be skipped and an additional week will be added to the schedule. Limiting the frequency to one walk per week maximizes feasibility of the protocol and minimizes training effects, with any training effects over time being handled primarily by randomization (condition order is balanced), but also in the statistical analysis.

Conditions

  • Stress
  • Attention

Interventions

OTHER

Suburban walk

Each subject is tested under the 'suburban' condition. We will compare the stress response and working memory response to walking in the two experimental conditions ((1)response to walking on a nature path and (2) response to walking on an urban sidewalk).

OTHER

Nature walk

Each subject is tested under the 'nature' condition. We will compare the stress response and working memory response to walking in the two experimental conditions ((1)response to walking on a nature path and (2) response to walking on an urban sidewalk).

Sponsors & Collaborators

Principal Investigators

  • Mark A Pereira, PhD · University of Minnesota

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
OTHER
Masking
NONE
Model
CROSSOVER

Eligibility

Min Age
35 Years
Max Age
59 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2017-07-14
Primary Completion
2019-04-01
Completion
2019-04-01

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

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Entities

Companies

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT03442998 on ClinicalTrials.gov