Consumer News: Where you live could help researchers understand healthy aging

New national data project will examine how neighborhood conditions change and affect older adults

• Researchers are expanding a national database that tracks neighborhood conditions across the U.S.

• The project will examine factors including access to healthcare, food, parks, and environmental hazards.

• The new data could help researchers and communities better understand the local factors connected to healthy aging.

When people think about healthy aging, things like diet, exercise, and medical care often come to mind. But researchers at the University of Michigan are taking a closer look at another factor: where people live.

With an $11 million award from the National Institute on Aging, University of Michigan researchers are expanding the National Neighborhood Data Archive, or NaNDA. The goal is to create and share national data showing how neighborhood conditions change over time and how those conditions may affect the health of older adults.

The existing database connects information about things such as access to parks, healthy food stores, healthcare, and other community resources with health outcomes including hospitalization, chronic disease, and disability.

Neighborhoods shape access to services, exposure to environmental hazards, and levels of social support, affecting cognitive function, mobility, and social interaction, Grace Noppert, a social and infectious disease epidemiologist at U-M and NaNDA deputy director, said in a news release.

Policymakers, community organizations, and researchers across fields use our data. Were creating a public resource that serves many people. Now, we can expand it and work toward becoming a one-stop shop for neighborhood data.

How researchers will map neighborhood health

The project isn't simply creating a map of where people live. Researchers will combine information from multiple sources to build a more detailed picture of neighborhoods across the country.

NaNDA's collection will grow by about 30%, adding information about the physical, economic, demographic and social characteristics of communities. The data will be available at several geographic levels, including census tracts, ZIP code areas, and counties.

Researchers also plan to use a 20% national sample of Medicare and Medicaid claims to identify communities with high rates of hospitalizations and emergency department visits for respiratory illnesses such as flu, RSV, and COVID.

Another part of the project will track exposure to environmental hazards, including wildfire smoke and high temperatures. Researchers will also develop methods for handling the challenges that come with combining different types of neighborhood data and examining changes over time.

What this could mean for consumers

The researchers aren't saying that a particular neighborhood automatically determines someone's health. Instead, the project is designed to give scientists a better way to examine the relationship between local environments and healthy aging.

That could eventually help researchers identify patterns in communities and give public health departments and community organizations more information about where resources may be needed. For example, the planned respiratory illness dashboard could help communities identify areas experiencing higher rates of hospitalizations and emergency care visits.

For consumers, the biggest takeaway is that healthy aging may be studied in a broader context than individual health choices alone. By making neighborhood data publicly available, researchers hope to give scientists and communities a clearer picture of how local conditions may connect with health as people get older.

The lack of a national, publicly available data infrastructure that includes comprehensive, longitudinal measures of the neighborhood environment has limited our ability to measure and track the dynamic nature of local-level environmental exposures and their impact on healthy aging, NaNDA director Philippa Clarke said in a news release.

Most research remains siloed within specific observational or clinical studies, where neighborhood data are not consistently shared, restricting transparency, reproducibility, and comparability of findings. NaNDA was designed to address this gap by creating and sharing data on the physical, economic, demographic, and social environment at multiple spatial scales, including block group, census tract, ZIP code tabulation area, and county.