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.

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.

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.

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.

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