2023 Theses Master's

The Relationship Between Infrastructure and Land Use Patterns and Cardiovascular Disease Risk In New York City

Ma, Moheng

Cardiovascular disease is currently one of the chronic diseases with the highest mortality rate in the world. By using open data and taking a total of 15 sub-categories of indicators in the three categories of socio-economy, natural environment and built environment as independent variables and the 2018 New York City Census tract scale of coronary heart disease prevalence over 18 years old as a dependent variable, the census tract scale cardiovascular disease risk is modeled in this paper. Also, Morans’I and GWR regression methods are used to analyze the relationship between built environment factors and the risk of cardiovascular diseases, with socio-economic indicators and natural environment indicators as control variables and built environment factors as main variables.

The effect of built environment factors on cardiovascular diseases has been found to be spatially heterogeneous. The GWR model can effectively improve the accuracy of OLS models. At the mesoscale, different factors have different impacts on cardiovascular disease. There is an obvious negative correlation between medical facilities, parks, public spaces, and compact land use patterns and cardiovascular diseases. Parks, medical facilities, public spaces, and public safety are more important in areas lacking them than areas where such facilities are available. Urbanization creates health inequalities, and we need to talk about this in a larger context.