Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #114182

Catherine Cubbin, PhD, Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, 500 Parnassus Avenue, MU-3 East, Box 0900, San Francisco, CA 94143-0900, 415-476-6620, ccubbin@itsa.ucsf.edu and Marilyn A. Winkleby, PhD, MPH, Stanford Prevention Research Center, Stanford School of Medicine, 211 Quarry Road, Room 229, Stanford, CA 94305-5705.

Although previous research has linked neighborhood-level deprivation to individual-level health behaviors and risk factors related to cardiovascular disease (CVD), few studies have examined health knowledge and behavior changes as dependent variables. Fewer studies have examined the potential protective effects of living in a non-deprived neighborhood. The authors examined associations between neighborhood-level deprivation and low CVD-related health knowledge, no positive CVD-related health behavior changes, and the estimated 12-year probability of experiencing a coronary heart disease event. Primary analyses included multilevel, logistic regression models among 8,197 women and men living in 82 neighborhoods in four northern California cites who were interviewed in one of five surveys conducted between 1979 and 1990. Compared with participants living in neighborhoods with moderate deprivation, living in neighborhoods with high deprivation was significantly associated with no positive behavior changes, while living in neighborhoods with low deprivation was protective for low health knowledge, after controlling for age, gender, race/ethnicity, a composite indicator of socioeconomic status (SES), city, and survey. The effects of neighborhood deprivation did not vary by individual-level SES. These results suggest that focusing exclusively on changing individuals' behaviors and knowledge will have a limited effect unless contextual influences at the neighborhood level are also addressed.

Learning Objectives:

• Educate participants about the influence of neighborhood socioeconomic status on CVD risk.
• Identify potential mechanisms of the neighborhood effects.

Keywords: Community Research, Social Inequalities

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation