Impact of neighborhood resources on cardiovascular disease: a nationwide six-year follow-up.

Background: Living in a socially deprived neighborhood is associated with lifestyle risk factors, e.g., smoking, physical inactivity and unhealthy diet, as well as an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, i.

Neighborhood linking social capital as a predictor of psychiatric medication prescription in the elderly: a Swedish national cohort study.

Objectives: Little is known about the association between neighborhood linking social capital and psychiatric medication in the elderly. The present study analyzes whether there is an association between linking social capital (a theoretical concept describing the amount of trust between individuals and societal institutions) and prescription of antipsychotics, anxiolytics, hypnotics/sedatives, antidepressants, or anti-dementia drugs.

Design, Setting, Participants And Measurements: The entire Swedish population aged 65+, a total of 1,292,816 individuals, were followed from 1 July 2005 until first prescription of psychiatric medication, death, emigration, or the end of the study on 31 December 2010.

Linking social capital and mortality in the elderly: a Swedish national cohort study.

Objectives: Our objective was to examine the association between neighborhood linking social capital (a concept describing the amount of trust between individuals and societal institutions) and all-cause and cause-specific mortality in the elderly.

Design: The entire Swedish population aged 65+, a total of 1,517,336 men and women, was followed from 1 January 2002 until death, emigration, or the end of the study on 31 December 2010. Small geographic units were used to define neighborhoods.

Neighbourhood environment and stroke: a follow-up study in Sweden.

Background: In recent years, research on the association between physical environments and cardiovascular disease outcomes has gained momentum with growing attention being paid to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This nationwide study is the first to examine the effect of neighbourhood physical environments on individual-level stroke, using GIS-based measures of neighbourhood availability of potentially health-damaging (fast food restaurants and pubs/bars) and health-promoting (physical activity and healthcare) resources.

Methods: The study population comprised a nationwide sample of 2,115,974 men and 2,193,700 women aged 35-80 years who were followed between 1 December 2005 and 31 December 2007 in Sweden.

Physical activity and concordance between objective and perceived walkability.

Purpose: The study's purpose was to investigate concordance between objective and perceived neighborhood walkability, their associations with self-reported walking and objective physical activity, and sociodemographic characteristics of individuals in neighborhoods with objectively assessed high walkability who misperceive it as low.

Methods: In 1925 individuals age 20-66 yr of both high and low neighborhood walkability recruited from administrative areas in the city of Stockholm, Sweden, objective neighborhood walkability was assessed within a 1000-m radius of each individual's residential address using geographic information systems. Perceived walkability was based on the Neighborhood Environment Walkability Scale.

Neighborhood walkability, physical activity, and walking behavior: the Swedish Neighborhood and Physical Activity (SNAP) study.

More knowledge concerning the association between physical activity and objectively measured attributes of the built environment is needed. Previous studies on the association between objectively measured neighborhood walkability, physical activity, and walking have been conducted in the U.S.

Health-promoting and health-damaging neighbourhood resources and coronary heart disease: a follow-up study of 2 165 000 people.

Background: It has been hypothesised that the presence of health-damaging factors and lack of health-promoting factors lie in the causal pathway between neighbourhood deprivation and coronary heart disease (CHD). This study is the first to examine the associations between individual-level CHD risk and neighbourhood availability of fast-food restaurants, bars/pubs, physical activity facilities and healthcare resources.

Methods: Multilevel logistic regression models were used for the follow-up of 1 065 000 men and 1 100 000 women (aged 35-80 years) between 1 December 2005 and 31 December 2007, for individual-level CHD events (both morbidity and mortality).

Differences in neighborhood accessibility to health-related resources: a nationwide comparison between deprived and affluent neighborhoods in Sweden.

This nationwide Swedish study used geocoded data from all businesses in Sweden to examine the distribution of 12 main categories of goods, services, and resources in 6986 neighborhoods, categorized as low, moderate, and high neighborhood deprivation. The main findings were that high- and moderate-deprivation neighborhoods had a significantly higher prevalence of all types of goods, services, and resources than low-deprivation neighborhoods. These findings do not support previous research that hypothesizes that poorer health among people in deprived neighborhoods is explained by a lack of health-promoting resources, although a higher presence of health-damaging resources may play a role.

Age dependency of esterase activity in rat and human keratinocytes.

The age and species dependent characteristics of cutaneous esterase activity were examined in cultured keratinocytes of neonatal and adult humans and of rats at the age of 1, 3, 10, and 50 d. The existence of esterases was characterized using fluorescein-5-isothiocyanate diacetate under a confocal laser scanning microscope. In vitro hydrolysis of ethyl nicotinate (EN), an esterified prodrug of nicotinic acid, was investigated in homogenate of cultured keratinocytes, and the Michaelis-Menten parameters (V(max) and K(m)) of EN were evaluated.