Search

Housing-mobility programs and housing choice vouchers provide low-income families with a potentially transformative opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. However, families often face barriers to attaining upward residential mobility; poor health may be one important barrier, although few studies have examined this hypothesis. We used the experimental Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Project (MTO) Study, constructed residential trajectories, and linked neighborhood opportunity measures to over 14,000 addresses of 3526 families across 7 years. We used latent growth curve longitudinal models to test how baseline health modified effects of MTO housing voucher treatment on neighborhood opportunity trajectories. Results show that poor baseline health adversely influenced how the voucher induced upward mobility. Voucher receipt strongly promoted residential mobility if families were healthy; moreover, the low-poverty neighborhood voucher plus counseling treatment promoted higher-opportunity neighborhood attainment than controls, regardless of the baseline health of the family. However, families with health vulnerabilities did not retain the same initial neighborhood gains conferred by the housing choice voucher (HCV) treatment as families without health vulnerabilities. These results suggest that housing counseling may be one necessary element to expand neighborhood choice into higher-opportunity neighborhoods for families with health challenges. Providing housing vouchers alone is insufficient to promote low-income-family high-opportunity moves, for families who have disabilities or special needs. The implications of these results point to scaling up housing-mobility programs, to provide tailored support for low-income families to use HCVs to make high-opportunity moves, which is particularly necessary for families with health challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Menopause marks the end of female reproductive capacity. It is defined as the point after cessation of the menstrual cycle for 12 months (Nursat et al., 2008). Awareness about menopause has increased over the last decade, yet studies have shown that women still lack knowledge regarding the subject. Likewise, awareness of women between the age of 40–65 on the potential role of physical activity prior to and during menopause in women is unclear. Women (n = 162) aged 40–65 years completed a survey rating their knowledge, answered fact-based questions and reported their experiences of menopause. Their levels of, and beliefs on, the role physical activity on symptoms and menopause associated disease risk were also collected. Women reported their confidence in their current knowledge level at 67% reflecting 37% higher rating than an estimate of their knowledge 10 years ago. Their factual knowledge score was 56%. Knowledge was primarily gained through friends and family and almost half (46%) had not spoken to a healthcare professional. Frustration was expressed with lack of knowledge and support of healthcare and others. Women using HRT (44%) had mixed attitudes towards its role. A high proportion were active and felt that physical activity can help manage symptoms and impact long-term health consequences of menopause. Menopause education strategies for women, healthcare professionals and others need to be improved. Lack of education may be causing women to struggle and feel negatively towards this life stage. Physical activity was viewed positively for the symptoms and a treatment during menopause and long-term health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research based on Swedish data suggests that collective optimism, as measured by monthly incidence of suicides, correlates inversely with selection in utero against male twins in a population. We test this finding in the US, which reports the highest suicide rate of all high-income countries, and examine whether monthly changes in overall suicides precede changes in the ratio of male twin to male singleton live births. Consistent with prior work, we also examine as a key independent variable, suicides among women aged 15−49 years. We retrieved monthly data on suicides and the ratio of male twin to singleton live births from CDC WONDER, 2003 to 2019, and applied Box-Jenkins iterative time-series routines to detect and remove autocorrelation from both series. Results indicate that a 1% increase in monthly change in overall suicides precedes a 0.005 unit decline in male twin live births ratio 6 months later (coefficient = −.005, p value =.004). Results remain robust to use of suicides among reproductive-aged women as the independent variable (coefficient = −.0012, p value =.014). Our study lends external validity to prior research and supports the notion that a decline in collective optimism corresponds with greater selection in utero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Research documents social and economic antecedents of adverse birth outcomes, which may include involuntary job loss. Previous work on job loss and adverse birth outcomes, however, lacks high-quality individual data on, and variation in, plausibly exogenous job loss during pregnancy and therefore cannot rule out strong confounding.Methods: We analysed unique linked registries in Denmark, from 1980 to 2017, to examine whether a father's involuntary job loss during his spouse's pregnancy increases the risk of a low-weight (i.e. <2500 grams) and/or preterm (i.e. <37 weeks of gestational age) birth. We applied a matched-sibling design to 743 574 sibling pairs.Results: Results indicate an increased risk of a low-weight birth among infants exposed in utero to fathers' unexpected job loss [odds ratio (OR) = 1.37, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.07, 1.75]. Sex-specific analyses show that this result holds for males (OR = 1.70, 95% CI: 1.14, 2.53) but not females (OR = 1.24, 95% CI: 0.80, 1.91). We find no relation with preterm birth.Conclusions: Findings support the inference that a father's unexpected job loss adversely affects the course of pregnancy, especially among males exposed in utero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Substantial research documents health consequences of neighborhood disadvantage. Patterns of residential mobility that differ by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) may sort non-Hispanic (NH) Black and low-SES families into disadvantaged neighborhoods. In this study, we leverage a sibling-linked dataset to track residential mobility among birthing persons between pregnancies and investigate baseline characteristics associated with downward mobility, including race/ethnicity, SES, and pre-existing health conditions. We used a probabilistic linkage strategy to identify births to the same person between 2007 and 2015 (n = 624,222) and categorized downward residential mobility by quartile-level increases in neighborhood disadvantage. We defined strong downward mobility as a move from a neighborhood with very low (quartile 1) to very high (quartile 4) disadvantage and estimated the logit (i.e., log-odds) of strong downward mobility as a function of racial/ethnic, sociodemographic, and health characteristics of the birthing person and their first birth. We further explored the role of neighborhood housing affordability by examining changes in affordability from first to second birth by race/ethnicity. NH Black birthing persons show an over three-fold increased odds of strong downward mobility relative to NH white birthing persons (OR = 3.34, CI: 2.91, 3.84). To a lesser extent, Hispanic race/ethnicity, WIC receipt, low educational attainment, obesity, and infant preterm birth (PTB) also predict strong downward mobility. Examination of changes in neighborhood affordability indicate that over half of NH Black birthing persons move to a more affordable neighborhood, compared to less than a quarter of NH white birthing persons, before the birth of their second child. Results remain consistent across outcomes, measures of neighborhood SES, and modified log-Poisson models. We find an elevated risk of strong downward mobility among NH Black and low-SES birthing persons. Future research may identify other factors (e.g., housing affordability) that generate downward residential mobility to identify interventions that promote neighborhood equity. • Longitudinal study of residential mobility among more than 600,000 birthing persons. • Black birthing persons show an elevated risk of downward mobility between births. • Neighborhood affordability may generate different racial-ethnic mobility patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Research on historical populations in Europe finds that infectious disease epidemics appear to induce predictable cycles in age‐specific mortality. We know little, however, about whether such cycles also occurred in less dense founder populations of North America. We used high‐quality data on the Quebecois population from 1680 to 1798 to examine the extent to which age‐specific mortality showed predictable epidemic cycles. We further examined whether environmental pressures—temperature, lack of precipitation, or crop failure—may have set the stage for the emergence of epidemics. Methods: We applied autoregressive, integrated, moving average time series methods to annual counts of period mortality for the following age groups: < 1 year, 1 to < 5 years, 5 to < 15 years, 15 to < 50 years, and 50 years and above. These methods controlled for other patterns (e.g., trend) before empirically identifying cycles. Results: Results indicate a strong seven‐year cycle in mortality among infants and children under seven years of age. Warm temperatures (across Quebec overall) and relatively dry years (in Eastern Quebec) also predicted an increased risk of mortality in infancy and childhood, although these environmental variables appear to act independently of the epidemic cycle pattern. Discussion: Findings indicate a strong seven‐year epidemic cycle in historical Quebec which afflicted naïve birth cohorts not previously exposed to the prior epidemic. We contend that smallpox epidemics likely contributed to this cycle. The seven‐year cycle occurred only in the latter half of the test period (post 1740) with increasing size of the colony and population concentration in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the importance of nature exposure in the modern era and the potential health benefits associated with it. It acknowledges the shift from a natural, outdoor lifestyle to one dominated by urban environments, which has limited access to nature, particularly for certain socioeconomic and racial/ethnic groups. The article emphasizes the negative consequences of reduced nature exposure on mental and physical health. It introduces two new technologies, NatureScoreTM and NatureDoseTM, which aim to quantify and promote nature exposure for health promotion purposes. NatureScoreTM is a dataset and tool that estimates the amount and quality of nature at any location, while NatureDoseTM is a mobile app that tracks an individual's daily or weekly exposure to nature. These technologies provide convenient and accurate ways to measure nature exposure and may help researchers understand the benefits of nature exposure and promote its use for health promotion. NatureDoseTM is a smartphone app that passively monitors a person's time spent indoors, outdoors, and outdoors in nature. The app uses the smartphone's sensors, geolocation, and a dataset called NatureScoreTM to determine the user's location and the amount of nature within a 1-km buffer. It assigns full nature exposure time credit when a user is outdoors in a designated natural area, and partial credit when they are outdoors but not in a natural area. The app also allows users to set a weekly goal for time spent outdoors in nature and tracks their progress. It has potential uses for clinicians, researchers, and policymakers, such as setting [Extracted from the article]