As the world’s population becomes increasingly urbanized, there is growing concern about the impact of urban environments on cardiovascular health. Urban residents are exposed to a variety of adverse environmental exposures throughout their lives, including air pollution, built environment, and lack of green space, which may contribute to the development of early cardiovascular disease and related risk factors. While epidemiological studies have examined the role of a few environmental factors with early cardiovascular disease, the relationship with the broader environment remains poorly defined. In this article, we provide a brief overview of studies that have examined the impact of the environment including the built physical environment, discuss current challenges in the field, and suggest potential directions for future research. Additionally, we highlight the clinical implications of these findings and propose multilevel interventions to promote cardiovascular health among children and young adults.

In this paper, we focus on migrant parents' decision to either bring children to the cities (family reunification) or leave them behind in China. We develop a framework to understand this decision, which takes into account child characteristics, characteristics of migrant parents and characteristics of migrant-receiving communities. Our research design allows us to conduct comparison of rural-origin children and urban-origin children. The rural-urban differences are reflected in lowered probability of bringing children to cities, more hurdles for housing and access to public school education for rural migrant parents and their children. For rural-origin school-age children, gender inequality is persistent, that is, girls of school age are less likely to be brought to cities than boys. Finally, a piece of promising news is that migrant parents with more social interactions with local residents are more likely to bring children to destinations. The results suggest that years after China's official policy of 'no extra fees' for migrant children in urban public schools, migrant children, especially from rural areas, continue to face a variety of challenges in moving to cities and having access to local urban public schools.

The UJA Covid-19 Jewish Impact Study constitutes a random sample of 4403 adults in Jewish households in the New York area. Collected between February and May 2021, the data include symptoms of depression and anxiety and the use of professional help. Via respondents’ zip code tabulation areas (ZCTAs), these data are linked to contextual measures of mental health care access from two data sources: the SAMHSA Locator on specialty community treatment clinics, and the Zip Code Business Patterns database on solo and small group practices. Both treatment facilities and office practices are added to multilevel logistic regression models as density rates (per 10,000 people) and as binary indicators of presence . While we find no meaningful relationship between the general presence of mental health care services and help-seeking behavior, the ZCTA-level density of office practices is significantly associated with service utilization among the socially isolated, foreign-born and Hispanics or non-white respondents.