This work conducted in collaboration between the University of Montreal and Inserm provides new information on the relationships between residential neighborhoods and blood pressure.

A previous work based on the RECORD Study had shown that socioeconomic position of the residential neighborhood, especially neighborhood educational level, was associated with the systolic blood pressure of participants.

In this new analysis, Andrea van Hulst from University of Montreal considered a large number of characteristics related to the physical environment, to the service environment, and to the social environment to construct a typology of neighborhoods. Such a classification allowed us to divide the RECORD Study territory into 6 categories of neighborhoods with differing patterns of urbanization, socioeconomic level, and social interactions.

Analyses showed that systolic blood pressure was higher among participants living in socially disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. This relationship persisted after accounting for the socioeconomic characteristics of participants and of their residential neighborhood and for different risk factors of hypertension.

Moreover, a negative relationship was documented between the degree of urbanization of the residential neighborhood and diastolic blood pressure, with a higher blood pressure in the least urbanized neighborhoods.

These new findings provide additional insight on the socio-territorial profile of hypertension.

In a forthcoming article in Preventive Medicine, Noëlla Karusisi sought to identify the characteristics of residential environments associated with the practice of jogging.

The objective of the study was to identify the characteristics of geographic environments that intervene as environmental barriers to a regular physical activity and could lead to the failure of traditional health education and promotion programs in certain neighborhoods.

The analyses showed that different factors of the physical environment and social interactional environment were associated with the practice of jogging and with the location of jogging (inside or outside the neighborhood).

The presence and the quality of green and open spaces, the presence of monuments and enjoyable sites, and a high degree of social cohesion in the neighborhood increased the probability of jogging over the previous 7 days.

Moreover, the presence and quality of green and open spaces, the objective surface of green spaces, and the presence of a lake or waterway in the neighborhood increased the likelihood to jog inside rather than outside one’s residential neighborhood.

This study suggests that all geographic environments do not support the practice of a regular physical activity in a similar way.

A recently published article in PLoS One examined whether the supermarket where people do most of their food shopping is associated with body weight and fat.

The study showed that the 7131 participants were shopping in 1097 different supermarkets. Almost 90% of the participants were shopping out of their immediate residential neighborhood.

The study suggests that two persons who were shopping in the same supermarket had a more similar body mass index and waist circumference than participants who were shopping in different supermarkets.

The analyses showed that shopping in specific supermarket brands, especially in specific hypermarkets and specific hard discount supermarkets, and in supermarkets attracting low educated customers was associated with a higher body mass index and a larger waist circumference.

The study also demonstrates that shopping in a hard discount supermarket was not associated with body weight and fat among participants with a high educational level, but that shopping in a hard discount was related to a higher body mass index and larger waist circumference with decreasing educational level of the participants.

These findings do not allow one to conclude to a causal effect of the primary supermarket used for food shopping. However, they suggest that supermarkets represent a relevant place to develop nutritional interventions. The study could be used to identify the supermarkets where such nutritional interventions would be most beneficial.

The sixth information letter of the RECORD Study has been sent to the participants of the study.

This letter describes the RECORD GPS Study that we currently implement, in which participants are invited to wear a GPS and an accelerometer for 7 days.

The letter also reports two articles related to our recent work. The first article is devoted to recreational walking, while the second is interested in the practice of jogging. Both analyses investigate relationships between multiple characteristics of residential environments, experiences made by individuals in their neighborhood, weather over the previous days, and physical activity behavior over the same period.

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In this article, Cinira Lefèvre examined whether different characteristics of the physical environment, service environment, and social-interactional environment were associated with the body mass index and waist circumference of the RECORD participants

The analyses suggest that, beyond socioeconomic characteristics of individuals and of their residential neighborhood, waist circumference was larger among participants residing in a neighborhood with a low building density, and where the densities of fruit and vegetable shops and restaurants (full service and fastfoods) and density of destinations were weak. Overall, the likelihood of excess fat was higher in non-dense neighborhoods.

However, analyses based on innovative approaches revealed that it is difficult to disentangle the effects of the different characteristics of the physical and service environment on excess body weight and fat, especially when these environmental factors are related to densities that are highly correlated with each others.

We therefore found it more reliable to only conclude to the existence of an overall protective effect of high densities in general.

The article can be downloaded here.

A new article based on the RECORD Study, related to the determinants of resting heart rate, has been accepted for publication in Social Science and Medicine.

At the individual level, a higher resting heart rate was observed among low educated participants and blue-collar workers, among participants who did not own their dwelling, and among those who did not have holidays over the previous year. Beyond and above individual factors, we found resting heart rate to increase with decreasing average education level of residents of the residential neighborhood.

Combining individual and neighborhood socioeconomic factors in a risk score, resting heart rate was increased by 1.1 beat per minute, 1.7 beat per minute, and 3.8 beats per minute in the three more and more disadvantaged socioeconomic groups, compared to the most advantaged one.

A mediation analysis showed that about 20% of the relationship between socioeconomic status and resting heart rate was attributable to the less frequent sport practice of disadvantaged populations, that 15% of the relationship was related to their higher resting heart rate, and that only 4% of the relationship was attributable to the shorter legs (and related risk factors) of disadvantaged participants.

The article can be downloaded here.

A new article describing the RECORD Study will soon appear in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

This document describes the main research hypotheses of the RECORD project and its objectives. It also provides an exhaustive list of the data collected in the study, with a particular interest for the data collection procedures implemented in the second wave of the study (e.g., related to the mobility data). Finally, the article summarizes the first set of findings obtained from the RECORD Study.

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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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.

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.