Investigating the effects of medical density on health-seeking behaviours using a multiscale approach to residential and activity spaces: results from a prospective cohort study in the Paris metropolitan area, France.

Background: When measuring neighbourhood effects on health, it is both incorrect to treat individuals as if they were static and tied to their residential neighbourhood and to consider neighbourhoods rigid places whose geographical scales can be delineated a priori. We propose here to investigate the effects of residential medical density on health-seeking behaviours, taking into account the mono/polycentric structure of individual activity space (i.e.