ArticleJournal of transport & health2019
Commute patterns and depression: Evidence from eleven Latin American cities.
Article in Journal of transport & health, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Active Commuting and Depression Symptoms in Adults: A Systematic Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2020Pooled it
- Active Travel Commuting and Autonomic Stress Recovery in Urban Populations.Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine · 2026Article
- How city living affects mental health-a qualitative exploration of urban stressors among adults in a megacity in India.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Urban Environments, Health, and Environmental Sustainability: Findings From the SALURBAL Study.Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine · 2024Review
- Perceptions of safety during everyday travel shaping older adults' mobility in Bengaluru, India.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Public transportation means as seen by citizens: Approaching the case of the Dominican Republic.Heliyon · 2024Article
- A unified dataset for the city-scale traffic assignment model in 20 U.S. cities.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Association Between Commuting Time and Subjective Well-Being in Relation to Regional Differences in Korea.Journal of Korean medical science · 2023Article
- Mediating Effect of Work-Family Conflict on the Relationship Between Long Commuting Time and Workers' Anxiety and Insomnia.Safety and health at work · 2023Article
- Correlation of commute time with the risk of subjective mental health problems: 6Annals of occupational and environmental medicine · 2023Article
- Using iterative random forest to find geospatial environmental and Sociodemographic predictors of suicide attempts.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Is city-level travel time by car associated with individual obesity or diabetes in Latin American cities? Evidence from 178 cities in the SALURBAL project.Cities (London, England) · 2022Article
- City-Level Travel Time and Individual Dietary Consumption in Latin American Cities: Results from the SALURBAL Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Commuting to work post-pandemic: Opportunities for health?Journal of transport & health · 2022Article
- Studies of the effectiveness of transport sector interventions in low- and middle-income countries: An evidence and gap map.Campbell systematic reviews · 2021Article
- Building a Methodological Foundation for Impactful Urban Planetary Health Science.Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine · 2021Article
- Support for market-based and command-and-control congestion relief policies in Latin American cities: Effects of mobility, environmental health, and city-level factors.Transportation research. Part A, Policy and practice · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
introductionAlthough travel behavior is expected to influence personal health, few studies have examined associations with mental health. This study examines associations between commute patterns and mental health using survey data in 11 Latin American cities.
methodsUsing a survey conducted by the Development Bank of Latin America in 2016, we measured the presence of depressive symptoms using the 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CESD-10) screening scale. We used multilevel non-linear models to estimate the magnitude of the associations between commute patterns and depression risk, adjusting for socio-demographic and neighborhood characteristics.
resultsWe found that, on average, every 10 more minutes of commuting time is associated with 0.5% (p = 0.011) higher probability of screening positively for depression. Furthermore, when decomposing commuting time into free-flow time and delay time, we found that delay and not free-flow time, were associated with depression. Specifically, every 10 additional minutes of traffic delay is associated with 0.8% (p = 0.037) higher probability of screening positively for depression. When examining differences by travel mode, we find that users of formal transit (e.g. subway or bus rapid transit) are 4.8% (p = 0.040) less likely to be screened positively for depression than drivers. In addition, not having transit stops within a 10-min walk from home is associated with higher probability of screening positively for depression.
conclusionsOur findings provide preliminary evidence that better access to mass transit systems and less congestion may be linked to better mental health among urban residents.
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