Health in the 'hood. people who were moved to richer areas ( left ) poor neighborhoods ( right ) in Chicago has become less obese and healthier
Fotosearch (left). Image courtesy of Sean Parnell (right)
If you started to pack on the pounds, your doctor may recommend you to get up and move. But a new study suggests that there is not that your body you should be moving. The researchers found that the movement of people out of poor neighborhoods can be as effective as drugs to reduce their chances of becoming obese and developing diabetes.
The idea that neighborhoods have subtle but powerful effects on our health back at least to the 1920s, said Jens Ludwig, a sociologist at the University of Chicago Law School. "This question is one that I am personally very interested in a long time, partly because I live here on the South Side of Chicago [where] there are huge disparities in people results from life and well be. "But how unravel the causes?
" Consider two low African American income 50 years, women in Chicago, "said Ludwig." We live in Hyde Park, "a middle-class neighborhood integrated "and the other lives in Washington Park," a nearby neighborhood, but extremely poor and racial segregation. "We see that the woman living in Hyde Park has better health," Ludwig said, but is it because of districts themselves or some difference between women that led them to choose where to live? The only way to resolve the cause and effect is to do a randomized, moving people around between neighborhoods and monitor their health for many years.
This is what the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) did, and a team led by Ludwig analyzed the results. In an attempt to suss out a link between education, employment and neighborhoods, HUD has recruited 4498 volunteers from 1994 to 1998 living in public housing in cities across the country and randomly assigned them to one the three groups. The first group received rent vouchers that allowed them to move to defined-quarters of the middle class as having less than 10% of residents with incomes below the poverty line. The second group received the same good to help with rent, but stayed in the same neighborhoods. And the third group was a control that has not been good and stayed put. The researchers checked the health of everyone at the beginning of the experiment and again between 08 and 2010, measuring data such as height, weight and the amount of hemoglobin in the blood bound to molecules sugar, which is an indicator of diabetes.
Areas of importance, Ludwig team found. The health of people who received rent subsidies but do not move showed no significant improvement. But people who moved to the middle-class neighborhoods were about 5% less likely to be signs of obesity and diabetes show that those were the people in the control group, today reports team in the New England Journal of Medicine . "These are pretty big effect," Ludwig said, "comparable in size to the long-term effects on diabetes, we see targeted lifestyle interventions or provide people with drugs that can prevent the onset of diabetes. "
experience clearly shows that the bystander effect is real, says Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston who studies the effect of social relationships on health, but the mechanisms remain dark . are the shops and restaurants, parks and pools, he wonders, "or people in a neighborhood that affect you the most?" For example, Christakis said, people who have moved may have lost weight because safer streets and open spaces "allowed them to walk out more, or because they saw thinner people around them, or both."
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