The heart of the matter: neighborhood violent crime and deprivation, cardiometabolic disease, and the racial invariance thesis

Studies have observed a tight spatial coupling of elevated violent crime rates, structural deprivation, and cardiometabolic disease prevalence across geographic areas. Conceptual perspectives in the health sciences provide a framework to explain this geographic concentration of poor health and crime, which differs from perspectives derived from macro-level criminology. Drawing on these different conceptual approaches, the current study uses administrative and survey data aggregated to Census tracts to examine whether violent crime and structural deprivation are factors for cardiometabolic disease prevalence. Drawing on the racial invariance thesis, the study also tests whether these patterns are invariant across neighborhoods of different racial and ethnic compositions. Multivariate results reveal that cardiometabolic disease varies directly with levels of violent crime but not structural deprivation. Furthermore, the results do not provide consistent support for the racial and ethnic invariance hypothesis. We discuss the implications of the findings for prevention models focused on modifiable risk factors of poor health in local geographic areas.