Urban ecosystem services are crucial for human well-being and the livability of cities. A central challenge for sustaining ecosystem services lies in addressing scale mismatches between ecological processes on one hand, and social processes of governance on the other. This article synthesizes a set of case studies from urban green areas in Stockholm, Sweden—allotment gardens, urban parks, cemet...

BACKGROUND Access to medical care differs between urban and rural residents, but the magnitude of these differences and whether they affect outcomes are unknown. We aimed to determine whether outcomes differ for patients with incident heart failure (HF) by urban-rural status. METHODS AND RESULTS This cohort study used administrative data from Alberta, Canada. Patients with incident HF were id...

The poorest billion people are distributed throughout the world, though most are concentrated in rural sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) data can be sparse in low- and middle-income countries beyond urban centers. Despite this urban bias, CVD registries from the poorest countries have long revealed a predominance of nonatherosclerotic stroke, hypertensive heart dis...

CONTEXT Disparities in access to organ transplantation exist for racial minorities, women, and patients with lower socioeconomic status or inadequate insurance. Rural residents represent another group that may have impaired access to transplant services. OBJECTIVE To assess the association of rural residence with waiting list registration for heart, liver, and kidney transplant and rates of t...

Although it is not happening uniformly within the country, the adoption of a modern lifestyle by Papua New Guineans is affecting their food habits and choices. More and more people consume rice, tinned fish and tinned meat. In towns and in villages with easy access to urban centres, these food items comprise an ever increasing part of the diet. These dietary changes are leading to increases in ...

Most PM2.5-associated mortality studies are not conducted in rural areas where mortality rates may differ when population characteristics, health care access, and PM2.5 composition differ. PM2.5-associated mortality was investigated in the elderly residing in rural-urban zip codes. Exposure (2000-2006) was estimated using different models and Poisson regression was performed using 2006 mortalit...

AIM To test the hypothesis that walking in a park has a greater positive effect on coronary artery disease (CAD) patients' hemodynamic parameters than walking in an urban environment. METHODS Twenty stable CAD patients were randomized into two groups: 30-minute walk on 7 consecutive days in either a city park or busy urban street. Wilcoxon signed-rank test was employed to study short-term (30...

Serum cholesterol, serum glyceride, blood glucose, relative weight, physical activity, percent calories from fat, percent calories from carbohydrate, and polyunsaturated/saturated fatty acid (P/S) ratio were determined in 1780 rural and 4023 urban fasting men aged 45-64 years being followed prospectively to ascertain reasons for the low prevalence of coronary heart disease mortality in Puerto R...

BACKGROUND Avoidable mortality as an indicator for assessing the health system performance has caught the attention of researchers for a long time. In this study we aimed to compare the health system performance using this indicator in rural and urban areas of one of Iran's southern provinces. METHODS All deaths (29916) which happened during 2004-2011 in Bushehr province were assessed. Nolte ...