Evaluating King County Population’s Cardiovascular Mortality Risk Factors: A GIS-based Approach

Minyou Yang, Bothell Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences – Environmental Science

Social-economic disparity has been shown to be one of the most significant risk factors in influencing a population’s health. Some factors that project this disparity include accessibility to fresh food options, green spaces, and healthcare; these amenities are unevenly distributed geographically similar to disease occurrence patterns. This study aims to use geographic information system (GIS) tools to depict the relationship between cardiovascular disease-induced mortality rate and accessibility to amenities such as farmer’s markets, food facilities, parks, and health insurances. We also used the target population’s demographic information such as age distribution, sex ratio, ethnicity, and population density in each census tract as our controlled variables. For all census tracts in King County (n=396), we determined each census tract’s accessibility to facilities by considering the count of facilities in each tract and the Euclidean distance from each centroid to the nearest facility as indicators of accessibility. We considered that neighboring census tracts will likely influence each other, so we used Moran’s I to test spatial autocorrelation. We used spatial lag, spatial error which found R2=0.37,0.38 and variables such as the number of people with insurance and ethnicity groups such as Asian population and White population appear to be statistically significant with P<0.05. The results of this study show the possibility of predicting risk factors of population’s cardiovascular health through the integration of public health and GIS models.