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. 

Enjoy your reading!

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.

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 the RECORD Study interested in the effects of geographic life environments, an important question is to know whether residents of the 2218 neighborhoods from Ile-de-France covered by the study all had comparable odds of participation, according to the different characteristics of their residential environment.

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 final version of the article can be downloaded here.

On June 23 2010, Cinira Leal will present her work during an oral communication at the Society for Epidemiologic Research at Seattle in the United States of America.

In her work, she demonstrates that important disparities in body mass index and waist circumference exist between the 111 municipalities and 10 districts of Paris investigated in the study. The analyses show that the average education level of the neighborhood is strongly associated with these indicators of excess weight and fat accumulation, after controlling for individual characteristics. The neighborhood education level seemed to be more strongly associated with body mass index and waist circumference when it was measured within 500 m radius circular areas than in broader or more local areas.

In these analyses, we compare classical statistical analyses with a more complex approach in which the participants from advantaged and disadvantaged neighborhoods are matched with each other based on their propensity score to be exposed. The powerpoint presentation can be downloaded here.

The third information letter of the RECORD Cohort Study has just been sent to the 7250 participants of the study.

This letter includes 3 articles that report information and findings obtained from our analyses. The first article is interested in the social disparities in resting heart rate that exist between socially advantaged and disadvantaged individuals and neighborhoods, and in the mechanisms that contribute to these inequalities. The objective of the second article is to identify the sociodemographic profiles of underweight, overweight, and obese participants, while taking into account the social origins of participants. In a third article, we describe some of the strategies to measure the characteristics of residential neighborhoods that are implemented in the RECORD Study.

Enjoy your reading!