The fifth information letter of the RECORD Cohort Study has just been sent to the participants of the study.

This letter includes two articles. The first study reported investigates whether there are relationships between the brand and characteristics of supermarkets where people shop and excess weight and abdominal fat. The second work is interested in the relationships between, on the one hand, multiple characteristics of the physical environment, of the service environment, and of the social-interactional environment, and on the other hand, body mass index and waist circumference.

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Since February 2011, we have started to invite all of the participants of the RECORD Study to a second health examination and to a second survey wave.

Coordinated by Inserm and by University Pierre et Marie Curie, the second study wave is conducted in collaboration with the Centre d’Investigations Préventives et Cliniques and the University of Montreal.

We have already interviewed and examined 880 participants.

Based on a second measurement of cardiovascular risk factors 4 or 5 years after the baseline measures, we will investigate the extent to which social characteristics of participants and the multiple characteristics of their residential neighborhoods are associated with changes in the cardiovascular risk profile over time.

Moreover, the second wave of the study is particularly interested in mobility, and geocodes a number of activity places to which people regularly go. These data should allow us to incorporate patterns of mobility and “spatial behavior” in the investigation of the effects of the environments on health.

In a second article accepted for publication in the US journal Epidemiology, Cinira Leal investigated, in the context of her PhD, the relationships between neighborhood socioeconomic status and body mass index or waist circumference in the Ile-de-France region.

In terms of methodology, the whole point is to know whether the empirical data available to us really allow us to conclude that there are relationships between neighborhood socioeconomic status and body mass index or waist circumference after adjustment for individual socioeconomic characteristics. Authors in the international scientific literature have suggested that such associations may be based on excessive extrapolations of regression models used for the analyses.

On the contrary, the work shows that it is possible to conclude, at least in the French Ile-de-France region, that body mass index and waist circumference increase regularly with decreasing socioeconomic status, especially average educational level, of the neighborhood.

The authors wish to thank the Ile-de-France Regional Health Agency, IReSP, and InVS for their support in this particular work.

Following the call for project 2010 of IReSP, we initiate a new project that aims to provide information to interventions seeking to reduce the prevalence of metabolic risk factors through the early detection of these risk factors and their medical control.

The objectives of the project are the following:

(i) examine whether there are disparities in the spatial accessibility to healthcare services in the study territory;

(ii) study social and spatial disparities in the biological screening of metabolic risk factors, medical follow-up, and access to recommended antihypertensive and lipopenic treatments;

(iii) explore the mechanisms contributing to these disparities by taking into account, in a multilevel perspective, factors related to the residential environment of participants, to the physicians and to their geographic context of practice, and to the individual level.

We gratefully thank INPES and IReSP, as well as CNAM-TS, for their support in this project.

UMR-S 707 is involved in a comprehensive work related to the health of the population of Paris coordinated by the Ile-de-France Regional Health Observatory for the Health Department of the City of Paris.

Analyses of the data collected for 2128 participants residing in Paris in the context of the RECORD Study will provide additional information related to the health of the population of Paris.

We thank the Health Department of the City of Paris, and particularly Ghislaine Grosset.

In the issue of January of Epidemiology will appear an article based on the RECORD Study as well as two commentaries related to this article (the first one and the second one).

In this work related to the prevalence of type 2 diabetes, we investigated the different factors that may influence participation of populations in the RECORD Cohort Study.

Epidemiologists usually pay a particular attention to "selection processes" that lead to retain in or exclude from their studies people who are particular with respect to the exposures or to the health outcomes of interest.

In these analyses, we found that a high individual education level and that residing nearby the health centers involved in the recruitment, in a socially advantaged neighborhood, or in a low population density neighborhood were associated with increased odds of participation in the RECORD Study.

In our work interested in the relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic status and type 2 diabetes, we showed that it is possible in certain cases to account for these selection biases in the analyses.

The fourth information letter of the RECORD Cohort Study has just been sent to the participants of the study.

This letter includes 3 articles. The first one describes some of the main objectives of the second wave of the study that is going to start at the beginning of 2011. The second article is related to the healthcare utilization behavior of participants, and is based on the administrative healthcare data that have been merged to the RECORD Study database. The third article is interested in social and socio-spatial disparities in oral health, and in the behavioral mechanisms that contribute to such disparities. 

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The aim of the study was to explore whether socially disadvantaged populations experience in their residential neighborhood higher noise exposure levels than socially advantaged populations.

The study was based on data from the noise monitoring agency of the City of Paris matched to the RECORD Cohort.

Contrary to studies performed in other countries, we showed that people living in socially advantaged neighborhoods of the City of Paris were likely to be exposed in their residential neighborhood to higher noise levels than individuals living in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Additional details on the study findings are available here. The corresponding article can be downloaded here.

On November 10 2010, in the 3^rd plenary session of the 12^th National Congress of the French ORS, we will present a summary of the work conducted so far based on the data of the RECORD Cohort Study.

The talk will successively report data on different risk factors of interest to us: excess weight, hypertension, elevated resting heart rate, and sedentarity. We will particularly insist on the fact that, beyond toxic environmental exposures, the environment in its different components (the physical environment, the service environment, and the social-interactional environment) may influence human health.

The presentation can be downloaded here.

The University of Montreal and Inserm are looking for a PhD candidate who will work on methodologies to measure and investigate individuals/environments interactions in relation to chronic diseases.

The doctorate will mainly take place in Montreal with periods of work in Paris with the RECORD Group. The candidate should have a Master in public health /epidemiology or in geomatics, and should have appreciable skills in statistical analysis. The student will be supervised by Yan Kestens (University of Montreal, Canada) and Basile Chaix (Inserm, France).

All details on this opportunity are reported in the attached document.