Impact of urban environment quality on the demographic indicators of population health

The article was prepared on the results of a study of the impact of urban environment quality (UEQ) on the demographic characteristics of city dwellers (birth and death rates, ageing index, birth-death ratio). These demographic indicators, in the authors' opinion, can reflect to a certain extent the state of population health. More comprehensive data on the Russian urban population health (life expectancy at birth, primary disease incidence by main disease classes, disability, etc.) are not published by Rosstat. This article is the first to set the task of assessing the impact of urban environment quality on city dwellers health through the urban environment quality index developed by specialists from the RF Ministry of Construction and other organizations in 2018. The study was carried out in 174 cities of the Russian Federation with a population of over 100 thousand people. The cities were grouped according to the following criteria: UEQ index, population size, belonging to Federal Districts. The strength of relationship was estimated by Spearmen rank correlation coefficient, the reliability of the obtained results was checked by scatterplot and Pearson correlation coefficient. Comparison of the city groups was made using nonparametric analysis of variance. To check the differences between the groups of cities, the Kruskal-Wallis test by ranks was implemented.