Several new papers from the group have come out in the past several months.

In the Journal of Urban Health we published a paper showing that New Yorker’s engagement in active transport, either walking or cycling, is positively associated with neighborhood walkability.  In a follow-up to that work published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, we showed that engagement in active transport is associated with the presence of outdoor neighborhood cafe’s, an indicator of street life, and with greater neighborhood safety.

We published a commentary in Open Epidemiology discussing the problems with using odds ratios as a measure of effect in research on obesity and physical activity.  For common outcomes such as obesity, odds ratios overestimate effect sizes and in analyses of interaction the use of odds ratios can cause the appearance of spurious interaction effects.

As part of our work on prostate cancer being conducted in collaboration with researchers at the Henry Ford Health System we have been investigating the effects of neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) and prostate cancer screening, risk and outcomes.  In a paper in Cancer Causes and Control we show that higher neighborhood SES is associated with; 1) younger age at first prostate biopsy, 2) more intensive PSA and DRE screening, and 3) higher risk of prostate cancer diagnosis.

Our most recent paper in Environmental Health Perspectives shows that  the extent of tree canopy cover in the neighborhood a child was born in, was associated with a higher risk of testing positive for tree pollen allergic sensitization during later childhood.  In addition, contrary to our hypotheses, the extent of tree canopy cover in the child’s neighborhood was not protective against asthma and in fact, the analyses suggest that the extent of tree canopy cover in the neighborhood at birth was associated with a higher risk of developing asthma during childhood.