STUDY OBJECTIVES To identify and quantify a hypothesised collective effect of the neighbourhood on individual use of anxiolytic-hypnotic drugs (AHD). To analyse the general impact of neighbourhood social participation on use of AHD, adjusting for individual characteristics. DESIGN Cross sectional analysis performed by multilevel logistic regression with women at the first level and neighbourh...

OBJECTIVE Encouraging help-seeking for mental illness is essential for prevention of suicide. This study examined the relationship between individual characteristics, neighbourhood contexts and help-seeking intentions for mental illness for the purpose of elucidating the role of neighbourhood in the help-seeking process. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS A cross-sectional web-based survey was ...

Communities of place feature prominently in new urbanism movements and in master-planned inner-city developments that result from urban renewal. This paper’s point of departure is the stark contrast between the widespread use of mobile and ubiquitous media and communications technology by urban dwellers on the one hand and endemic forms of urban alienation and the disappearance or non-existence...

BACKGROUND Physical activity is important for healthy ageing, and daily walking is seen as a feasible way to be active at older ages. Yet, many older persons, particularly in lower socioeconomic groups and residing in deprived neighbourhoods, are insufficiently active. Creating a physical and social neighbourhood environment that is more supportive for walking has the potential to improve walki...

Introduction. Through this paper we report on an exploratory study into the design and use of neighbourhood book exchanges in North America. We identify dominant media framings of these book exchanges in North America, along with claims made concerning the influence of the exchanges. We compare the media claims with insights from interviews with the stewards of six book exchanges in an urban ce...

OBJECTIVES Empirical studies of the association between neighbourhood food environments and individual obesity risk have found mixed results. One possible cause of these mixed findings is the variation in neighbourhood geographic scale used. The purpose of this paper was to examine how various neighbourhood geographic scales affected the estimated relationship between food environments and obes...

The two-player game of Nim on graphs is played on a regular graph with positively weighted edges by moving alternately from a fixed starting vertex to an adjacent vertex, decreasing the weight of the incident edge to a strictly smaller non-negative integer. The game ends when a player is unable to move since all edges incident with the vertex from which the player is to move have weight zero. I...

In the perpetual gossiping problem, introduced by Liestman and Richards, information may be generated at any time and at any vertex of a graph G; adjacent vertices can communicate by telephone calls. We define Wk(G) to be the minimum w such that, placing at most k calls each time unit, we can ensure that every piece of information is known to every vertex within w time units of its generation. ...