Environment International (Jul 2022)

Urban environment and health behaviours in children from six European countries

  • Sílvia Fernández-Barrés,
  • Oliver Robinson,
  • Serena Fossati,
  • Sandra Márquez,
  • Xavier Basagaña,
  • Jeroen de Bont,
  • Montserrat de Castro,
  • David Donaire-Gonzalez,
  • Léa Maitre,
  • Mark Nieuwenhuijsen,
  • Dora Romaguera,
  • José Urquiza,
  • Leda Chatzi,
  • Minas Iakovides,
  • Marina Vafeiadi,
  • Regina Grazuleviciene,
  • Audrius Dedele,
  • Sandra Andrusaityte,
  • Gunn Marit Aasvang,
  • Jorunn Evandt,
  • Norun Hjertager Krog,
  • Johanna Lepeule,
  • Barbara Heude,
  • John Wright,
  • Rosemary R.C. McEachan,
  • Franco Sassi,
  • Paolo Vineis,
  • Martine Vrijheid

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 165
p. 107319

Abstract

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Background: Urban environmental design is increasingly considered influential for health and wellbeing, but evidence is mostly based on adults and single exposure studies. We evaluated the association between a wide range of urban environment characteristics and health behaviours in childhood. Methods: We estimated exposure to 32 urban environment characteristics (related to the built environment, traffic, and natural spaces) for home and school addresses of 1,581 children aged 6–11 years from six European cohorts. We collected information on health behaviours including total amount of overall moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, physical activity outside school hours, active transport, sedentary behaviours and sleep duration, and developed patterns of behaviours with principal component analysis. We used an exposure-wide association study to screen all exposure-outcome associations, and the deletion-substitution-addition algorithm to build a final multi-exposure model. Results: In multi-exposure models, green spaces (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, NDVI) were positively associated with active transport, and inversely associated with sedentary time (22.71 min/day less (95 %CI −39.90, −5.51) per interquartile range increase in NDVI). Residence in densely built areas was associated with more physical activity and less sedentary time, and densely populated areas with less physical activity outside school hours and more sedentary time. Presence of a major road was associated with lower sleep duration (-4.80 min/day (95 %CI −9.11, −0.48); compared with no major road). Results for the behavioural patterns were similar. Conclusions: This multicohort study suggests that areas with more vegetation, more building density, less population density and without major roads are associated with improved health behaviours in childhood.

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