Cohort profile: Residential and non-residential environments, individual activity spaces and cardiovascular risk factors and diseases-The RECORD cohort study

Over the last few decades, due to the geographic concentration of poverty, socio-economic disparities between cities and neighbourhoods have increased in considerable proportions in France,1 with negative consequences for the daily lives of residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Despite this increase in the geographic component of social inequalities, neighbourhood determinants of health have been largely neglected in French research until recently.2,3

In this context, it is critical to monitor territorial disparities in health between affluent and disadvantaged neighbourhoods and understand the processes through which neighbourhood poverty may influence health.4–7 Such data are important for policymakers to identify priority targets to reduce socio-spatial disparities in health, even if socio-epidemiologists cannot make the a priori assumption that easily modifiable factors exist to substantially decrease health disparities without addressing fundamental inequalities in wealth or income and socio-spatial segregation itself.

The RECORD Cohort Study (‘Residential Environment and Coronary heart Disease’, www.record-study.org) was established in 2007–08 to investigate environmental determinants of territorial disparities in health. In an urban health perspective,8 the cohort was recruited in peri-urban and urban municipalities of the Paris metropolitan area, a geographically coherent territory with the largest territorial income disparities among French regions.1

The RECORD Study is coordinated by Inserm and Université Pierre et Marie Curie, and developed in collaboration with the Centre d'Investigations Préventives et Cliniques (IPC). The University of Montreal has joined the consortium since the second wave of the study.