OBJECTIVE To assess the associations of social determinants on cardiovascular health among White and Black residing in Stroke Belt (urban) and Stroke Buckle (rural) regions of the South. DESIGN A cross-sectional observational analysis based on a random digit-dial telephone survey of a representative sample of White and Black adults residing in urban and rural Georgia conducted from 2004-2005....

Urban upbringing has consistently been associated with schizophrenia, but which specific environmental exposures are reflected by this epidemiological observation and how they impact the developing brain to increase risk is largely unknown. On the basis of prior observations of abnormal functional brain processing of social stress in urban-born humans and preclinical evidence for enduring struc...

Among poor, urban adolescents, high rates of community violence are a pressing public health concern. This study relies on a contextual framework of stress and coping to investigate how coping strategies and involuntary stress responses may both mediate and moderate the relation between exposure to community violence and psychological well-being. Our sample consists of 223 ninth grade Latino ad...

Physical settings can play a role in coping with stress; in particular experimental research has found strong evidence between exposure to natural environments and recovery from physiological stress and mental fatigue, giving support to both Stress Recovery Theory and Attention Restoration Theory. In fact, exposure to natural environments protects people against the impact of environmental stre...

BACKGROUND Occupational stress and unhealthy lifestyles are common characteristics of urban workers. The association between health behaviors and job stress of urban Brazilian civil servants was studied. METHODS A cross-sectional study included 893 workers. Health markers, the dependent variables, were: Fruit/vegetable (FV) and alcohol (A) intake, physical activity (PA), including at work (PA...

Brent D. Ryan first visited Detroit in 1993. Describing this experience, he says: ‘‘The sense of emptiness was overpowering. ... I felt as if I was walking into the ruin of America.’’ In his book ‘‘Design after decline—how America rebuilds shrinking cities,’’ Ryan tries to understand why so many American cities have been losing population, what was and is done to change the fortune of these cit...