Acute Changes in Community Violence and Increases in Hospital Visits and Deaths From Stress-responsive Diseases.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Community violence may affect a broad range of health outcomes through physiologic stress responses and changes in health behaviors among residents. However, existing research on the health impacts of community violence suffers from problems with bias.

Methods

We examined the relations of acute changes in community violence with hospital visits and deaths due to stress-responsive diseases (mental, respiratory, and cardiac conditions) in statewide data from California 2005-2013. The community violence exposure was measured as both binary spikes and continuous acute changes. We applied a combined fixed-effects and time-series design that separates the effects of violence from those of community- and individual-level confounders more effectively than past research. T

SUBMITTER: Ahern J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6066424 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature