Abstract 11448: Secondary Quantitative Data Analysis of Active Commuting Infrastructure and Coronary Heart Disease in the United States

Background: It is established in modern scientific literature that physical inactivity is a significant risk factor for coronary heart disease. Implementing active commuting modalities like walking, cycling, and taking public transportation into daily living has been shown to increase physical activity. Prior research has shown the built environment influences the feasibility and likelihood of active commuting behavior. This begs the question of how the prevalence of coronary heart disease is impacted by available active commuting infrastructure.

Purpose: Objective investigation of the relationship between active commuting infrastructure and age-adjusted prevalence of coronary heart disease, and associated cardiovascular risk factors in American cities.

Methods: A quantitative secondary data analysis examining active commuting infrastructure via WalkScore, BikeScore, and TransitScore were correlated with and regressed against both risk factors for and age-adjusted prevalence of coronary heart disease. The sample included the top 150 most populated cities in the United States.

Results: Better active commuting infrastructure has a strong inverse relationship with coronary heart disease prevalence and associated risk factors including hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and obesity. There are some limitations with conclusions that can be drawn from TransitScore and WalkScore due to lack of linearity in the data. Biking infrastructure has the most robust inverse correlation against coronary heart disease (R = -0.355, R ² = 0.126, p = <0.001, B co-efficient = 6.995, CI = [6.425, 7.485]).

Conclusion: Investing in active commuting infrastructure, particularly promoting cycling, could be a population level method of primary prevention to decrease the morbidity and mortality due to coronary heart disease in American cities.