Grant: Op Gr: HCRI - Data Analysis Using Existing Databases and Cohorts - General Pool

In accordance with the objectives of this call, our team of non-governmental organizations, city planners, epidemiologists and policy makers will use novel causal methods to determine the health impact of a large a population health intervention, the expansion of urban physical activity (PA) trails in five cities within four Canadian provinces. The proposed analyses will address critical contextual questions that will determine if PA trails are an effective, innovative, scalable, and sustainable population intervention for reducing cardiovascular disease (CVD). We will fill knowledge gaps that are critical for future population interventions, by identifying contextual information that influences the effectiveness of new urban trails in multiple Canadian cities. Analyses will directly inform policy makers on our team, who can use the results to inform future design and construction of urban trails. We will accomplish these goals by linking health data for heart disease risk factors and deaths to data available from the each about about their cycling paths and other aspects of the built environment and the Canadian census to know who lives in the neighbourhoods that received a trail. We will study the "natural experiments" of building new cycle paths in each city on the heart health of the neighbourhoods that get one. This will e the largest study ever in Canada on the health impacts of adding new protected lanes for bicycling on the health of neighbourhoods in urban areas.