Linkage of the 1999-2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys to traffic indicators from the National Highway Planning Network.

OBJECTIVES Growing evidence has shown the harmful effects of traffic-related pollution on human health, including adverse respiratory, cardiovascular, and pregnancy outcomes. This report describes the linkage of data from the 1999-2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) and traffic indicators from the 2005 National Highway Planning Network. METHODS The residential addresses of NHANES participants were used to assign the distance to the nearest road, the number of roads within concentric buffers of specific radii, and the average annual daily traffic. Summaries of these traffic indicators by participant characteristics, including urbanization of their county of residence, race and ethnicity, poverty status, and health status, were tabulated. RESULTS Using the traffic indicators, these data show differences in traffic exposure by several participant characteristics including poverty status. Further, reporting of fair or poor health was more common among NHANES respondents nearer to, compared with farther from, roads; this relationship was observed overall and for subgroups defined by urban county of residence, poverty status, and self-reported cigarette smoking. CONCLUSIONS These data may be a resource for understanding relationships between traffic exposure and adverse health, and for identifying subgroups that may be at increased risk. The NHANES-traffic data are restricted use and available to data users in the Research Data Center at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.