A new study lends more support to the idea that where you live can affect your health. In an experiment that started in the 1990s, the federal government offered thousands of low-income women living in public housing in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Boston an opportunity to move to a more affluent neighborhood and see if it improved their health.  

Now more than a decade since the experiment began, researchers have found that the relocated women had lower rates of obesity as well as lower rates of extreme obesity. For example, 16 percent of the women who were relocated had diabetes compared to 20 percent who remained in public housing. About 14 percent of the women who were relocated were extremely obese compared to nearly 18 percent who stayed in public housing. 

"This study proves that concentrated poverty is not only bad policy, it's bad for your health," said Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD arranged for the study, which appeared this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"This is one of the first studies to show that where you live — the circumstances of your neighborhood, the social characteristics of the people around you — all these things may play a role in your own health," Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study, told the Los Angeles Times. "Your health is not just what happens to you, but is influenced by all of those around you and the environment. … Some environments are toxic to health."

Source: “Study Finds Poor Health in Poorer Neighborhoods,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Oct. 20, 2011) and “Poor Neighborhoods May Contribute to Poor Health,” Los Angeles Times (Oct. 20, 2011)

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