Public Health

The Relationship Between Bicycle Commuting and Perceived Stress: A Cross-sectional Study

Avila-Palencia, I
Nazelle, A De
Cole-Hunter, T
Donaire-Gonzalez, D
Jarrett, M
Rodriguez, D
Nieuwenhuijsen, MJ
2017

Active commuting — walking and bicycling for travel to and/or from work or educational addresses — may facilitate daily, routine physical activity. Several studies have investigated the relationship between active commuting and commuting stress; however, there are no studies examining the relationship between solely bicycle commuting and perceived stress, or studies that account for environmental determinants of bicycle commuting and stress. The current study evaluated the relationship between bicycle commuting, among working or studying adults in a dense urban setting, and perceived...

Where are Adults Active? An Examination of Physical Activity Locations Using GPS in Five US Cities

Holliday, KM
Howard, AG
Emch, M
Rodriguez, D
Evenson, K
2017

Increasing physical activity (PA) at the population level requires appropriately targeting intervention development. Identifying the locations in which participants with various sociodemographic, body weight, and geographic characteristics tend to engage in varying intensities of PA as well as locations these populations underutilize for PA may facilitate this process. A visual location-coding protocol was developed and implemented in Google Fusion Tables and Maps using data from participants (N = 223, age 18–85) in five states. Participants concurrently wore ActiGraph...

Are Buffers Around Home Representative of Physical Activity Spaces Among Adults?

Holliday, KM
Howard, AG
Emch, M
Rodriguez, DA
Evenson, KR
2017

Residential buffers are frequently used to assess built environment characteristics relevant to physical activity (PA), yet little is known about how well they represent the spatial areas in which individuals undertake PA. We used System for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities data for 217 adults from five US states who wore an accelerometer and a GPS for three weeks to create newly defined PA-specific activity spaces. These PA spaces were based on PA occurring in bouts of ≥10min and were defined as 1) the single minimum convex polygon (MCP) containing all of a...

What Makes an Active Public Realm? Opportunities and Challenges for Research

Harvey, C
Rodriguez, DA
2017

Contemporary cities have more extensive public spaces than everbefore. Consider the vast expanses of highways, parking lots, and sprawling floor plans of malls and shopping centers. These are all, tech-nically, available for public use, the habitat for our everyday experiences outside the privacy of our homes, schools, and workplaces. Right outside our front doors, they are by far the most convenient places for physical activity and community engagement. Yet the omnipresence of...

Neighborhood Environment and Cognition in Older Adults: A Systematic Review

Besser, L
McDonald, N
Song, Y
Kukull, W
Rodriguez, DA
2017
Some evidence suggests that treating vascular risk factors and performing mentally stimulating activities may delay cognitive impairment onset in older adults. Exposure to a complex...

Reliability and One-Year Stability of the PIN3 Neighborhood Environmental Audit in Urban and Rural Neighborhoods

Porter, AK
Wen, F
Herring, AH
Rodriguez, D
Messer, LC
Laraia, BA
Evenson, K
2018

Reliable and stable environmental audit instruments are needed to successfully identify the physical and social attributes that may influence physical activity. This study described the reliability and stability of the PIN3 environmental audit instrument in both urban and rural neighborhoods. Four randomly sampled road segments in and around a one-quarter mile buffer of participants’ residences from the Pregnancy, Infection, and Nutrition (PIN3) study were rated twice, approximately 2 weeks apart. One year later, 253 of the year 1 sampled roads were re-audited. The instrument...

Park Use and Physical Activity Among Adolescent Girls at Two Time Points

Evenson, KR
Cho, GH
Rodriguez, DA
Cohen, DA
2018

This longitudinal study described park usage and assessed the contribution of parks to moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) among adolescent girls. High school girls from California (n = 131) and Minnesota (n = 134) wore a global positioning system (GPS) monitor and accelerometer for 6 consecutive days at two time points, one year apart. Park visits were classified by linking the GPS, accelerometer, and park and built environment data around home and school locations into a geographic information system. At baseline, 20% of girls visited a park at least once (mean 0.1 times/...

Deriving a GPS Monitoring Time Recommendation for Physical Activity Studies of Adults

Holliday, KM
Howard, AG
Emch, M
Rodriguez, DA
Rosamond, WD
Evenson, K
2018

Determining locations of physical activity (PA) is important for surveillance and intervention development, yet recommendations for using location recording tools like Geographic Positioning System (GPS) units are lacking. Specifically, no recommendation exists for the number of days study participants should wear a GPS to reliably estimate PA time spent in locations. This study used data from participants (N=224, age 18-85) in five states who concurrently wore an ActiGraph GT1M accelerometer and a Qstarz BT-Q1000X GPS for three consecutive weeks to construct monitoring day recommendations...

A Novel International Partnership for Actionable Evidence on Urban Health in Latin America: LAC‐urban health and SALURBAL

Roux, AV Diez
Slesinski, SC
Alazraqui, M
Caiaffa, W
Frenz, P
Fuchs, R
Miranda, J
Rodriguez, D
2018

This article describes the origins and characteristics of an interdisciplinary multinational collaboration aimed at promoting and disseminating actionable evidence on the drivers of health in cities in Latin America and the Caribbean: The Network for Urban Health in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Wellcome Trust funded SALURBAL (Salud Urbana en América Latina, or Urban Health in Latin America) Project. Both initiatives have the goals of supporting urban policies that promote health and health equity in cities of the region while at the same time generating generalizable...

Building a Data Platform for Cross-Country Urban Health Studies: The SALURBAL Study

Quistberg, D
Roux, AV Diez
Bilal, U
Moore, K
Ortigoza, A
Rodriguez, D
Sarmiento, O
Frenz, P
Friche, A
Caiaffa, WT
Vives, A
Miranda, J
the SALURBAL group
2018

Studies examining urban health and the environment must ensure comparability of measures across cities and countries. We describe a data platform and process that integrates health outcomes together with physical and social environment data to examine multilevel aspects of health across cities in 11 Latin American countries. We used two complementary sources to identify cities with ≥ 100,000 inhabitants as of 2010 in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and Peru. We defined cities in three ways: administratively,...