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.

中文翻译：

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欧洲六国儿童的城市环境与健康行为

背景

城市环境设计越来越被认为对健康和福祉有影响，但证据主要基于成人和单一暴露研究。我们评估了广泛的城市环境特征与儿童期健康行为之间的关联。

方法

我们估计了来自六个欧洲队列的 1,581 名 6-11 岁儿童的家庭和学校地址的 32 个城市环境特征（与建筑环境、交通和自然空间相关）。我们收集了有关健康行为的信息，包括总体中度到剧烈的体育活动总量、课外体育活动量、主动交通、久坐行为和睡眠时间，并通过主成分分析开发了行为模式。我们使用暴露范围关联研究来筛选所有暴露结果关联，并使用删除-替换-添加算法来构建最终的多暴露模型。

结果

在多重暴露模型中，绿色空间（归一化差异植被指数，NDVI）与主动运输呈正相关，与每四分位间距增加的久坐时间（减少 22.71 分钟/天（95 %CI -39.90，-5.51）负相关） NDVI）。居住在建筑密集的地区与更多的身体活动和更少的久坐时间有关，而在人口稠密的地区，在课外时间的身体活动更少和更多的久坐时间。存在主要道路与较低的睡眠时间相关（-4.80 分钟/天（95 %CI -9.11，-0.48）；与没有主要道路相比）。行为模式的结果是相似的。

结论

这项多队列研究表明，植被较多、建筑密度较高、人口密度较低且没有主要道路的地区与儿童期健康行为的改善有关。