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January 18, 2005
Why the big city'll kill ya: My New York article on stress












New York magazine just published an issue devoted to "stress and the city" -- and for it, they asked me to write a piece on the latest scientific research into why cities can be such fist-clenching places to live. Here's my personal favorite bit of research I stumbled upon:

In fact, just crossing New York City borders is enough to set your teeth on edge. In 1999, Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychology professor at the University of California, examined the national rates at which people die of heart attacks. In New York, he noticed, the rates are 55 percent higher than the national average. “It stands out like a red light on the map,” he says. Then Christenfeld examined the rates of heart attacks among visitors to New York. Amazingly, those numbers were also elevated—34 percent higher than normal. The reverse was also true—when New Yorkers travel to other parts of the country, their rates drop below the city’s norm by 20 percent.

Turns out your paranoid mother was right: The city really will kill you. “It’s incredible,” Christenfeld marvels. “Just by visiting New York, you pick up half of the stress effect of living there. And you can shed half of it by leaving.”

You can read the rest of the story online here -- or, if you live in New York, pick up a print copy yourself and see the whole package!

Posted by Clive Thompson at January 18, 2005 01:54 AM

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 Comments

Someday I want to be quoted, in my professional capacity, for saying something like, "I have to do this shit and go to a suck-ass job so the guy at the top can get driven in by a limo?"

Posted by: debcha at January 18, 2005 11:13 AM

Ahahha! That researcher Gerrin is a terrific guy -- very smart and extremely funny.

Posted by: Clive at January 18, 2005 5:07 PM

Wasn't there a CDC report that the suburbs makes you fat and sedentary and will kill you also? And a later one on declining health in rural America? So, between the CDC and New York magazine, there is nowhere to go to live a long life.

Posted by: george at January 19, 2005 12:15 PM

It's true. We're all doomed.

Posted by: Clive at January 20, 2005 11:21 AM

I think that high mortality rates from heart attacks probably relate to the delay in access to health care. If your heart goes into ventricular fibrillation, you're likely to die if you're not given proper CPR and defibrillated within about 4 minutes. Congestion on the streets and poor training of the public in CPR means that in NYC, if you go into an arrhythmia, you're pretty much screwed. I seem to recall that someplace (Seattle?) had radically reorganized their ACLS provision, improving access to defibrillators and possibly (I may not have this right) requiring CPR certification as a condition of becoming licensed to drive, and were rewarded by a large decrease in sudden cardiac death.

Posted by: Jonathan Hayes at January 20, 2005 10:29 PM

I'm sure that's true about New York, but wouldn't it also be true about many trackless suburbs and rural areas? In that case, the problem is not congestion in the streets but the how remote you're likely to be from the nearest ambulance dispatch.

Posted by: Clive at January 21, 2005 1:23 PM

Agreed - it's the delay in access that is key. I think there's a point at which urban congestion becomes so great that the advantages of the density of health care providers becomes overwhelmed by their inaccessibility as the result of the traffic. There's probably some sort of ideal city size which balances the two neatly.

I think the newer cities in the Sunbelt are also much more effective in terms of reducing transit times.

If the issue is the statistics, the rural deaths from heart attacks are far less numerous than the urban deaths because of population density or lack thereof. But I bet you'd find higher death *rates* in rural areas from heart attacks.

Posted by: Jonathan Hayes at January 21, 2005 8:24 PM

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