Publications by authors named "Sima Namin"

Introduction: Housing discrimination as one of the main mechanisms for reinforcing racial segregation has persisted historically in the United States through a process known as "redlining." In recent years, researchers across different disciplines have utilized the iconic "residential security maps" created by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s to analyze the structural roots of racial disparities. HOLC maps designated grading of "best" to "still desirable" to "definitely declining" and "hazardous" to urban areas where percentage of African American and foreigners were among the reordered measures.

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Article Synopsis
  • Pedestrian and cyclist injuries in Canada are on the rise, particularly during the pandemic, and are largely preventable.
  • A study in Toronto compared police-reported collision data with hospital visits and found that health service data showed significantly more injuries than police reports, especially for cyclists.
  • The findings highlight the need for better data integration between police reports and health services to accurately assess and improve road safety for pedestrians and cyclists.
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Housing discrimination and racial segregation have a long history in the United States. The 1930's Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) "residential security maps," recently digitized, have become a popular visualization of Depression era mortgage lending risk patterns across American cities. Numerous housing policies have since been instituted, including the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), but mortgage lending bias persists.

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Background: Burning fossil fuels, including coal, is the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions driving anthropogenic climate change and its associated health harms. Coal-fired power plants supply 23% of electricity nationally and 42% for Wisconsin, contributing to air pollution and associated respiratory diseases, cancers, and cardiovascular and neurologic disorders, especially for vulnerable populations. Authors seek to quantify residential distance from coal-fired power plants, pulmonary function of Wisconsin residents, and demographics.

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The intersecting negative effects of structural racism, COVID-19, climate change, and chronic diseases disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities in the US and around the world. Urban populations of color are concentrated in historically redlined, segregated, disinvested, and marginalized neighborhoods with inadequate quality housing and limited access to resources, including quality greenspaces designed to support natural ecosystems and healthy outdoor activities while mitigating urban environmental challenges such as air pollution, heat island effects, combined sewer overflows and poor water quality. Disinvested urban environments thus contribute to health inequity via physical and social environmental exposures, resulting in disparities across numerous health outcomes, including COVID-19 and chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases (CVD).

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There is a growing literature on the association between neighborhood contexts and cancer survivorship. To understand the current trends and the gaps in the literature, we aimed to answer the following questions: To what degree, and how, has cancer survivorship research accounted for neighborhood-level effects? What neighborhood metrics have been used to operationalize neighborhood factors? To what degree do the neighborhood level metrics considered in cancer research reflect neighborhood development as identified in the Leadership for Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) guidelines? We first conducted a review guided by PRISMA extension for scoping review of the extant literature on neighborhood effects and cancer survivorship outcomes from January 2000 to January 2021. Second, we categorized the studied neighborhood metrics under six main themes.

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Purpose: The objective was to examine the relationship between contemporary redlining (mortgage lending bias on the basis of property location) and survival among older women with breast cancer in the United States.

Methods: A redlining index using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data (2007-2013) was linked by census tract with a SEER-Medicare cohort of 27,516 women age 66-90 years with an initial diagnosis of stage I-IV breast cancer in 2007-2009 and follow-up through 2015. Cox proportional hazards models were used to examine the relationship between redlining and both all-cause and breast cancer-specific mortality, accounting for covariates.

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Importance: Clostridioides difficile infection is the most frequent health care-associated infection in the United States. However, exposure to this organism might occur outside the health care setting.

Objective: To examine whether exposure to environmental factors, such as livestock farms, is associated with a higher probability of being colonized with C difficile at hospital admission.

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