ANN ARBOR—With an $11 million award from the National Institute on Aging, University of Michigan researchers will build and share national data that track how neighborhood conditions change over time, helping scientists study how local environments affect older adults’ health.

The National Neighborhood Data Archive, or NaNDA, housed at U-M’s Institute for Social Research, will expand its collection by about 30%. It links access to parks, healthy food stores, health care and other community resources with lower risks of hospitalization, chronic disease and disability among older adults.

The archive currently offers more than 250 free public datasets that users have downloaded 125,000 times and cited in more than 270 publications. 

“Neighborhoods shape access to services, exposure to environmental hazards and levels of social support, affecting cognitive function, mobility and social interaction,” said Grace Noppert, a social and infectious disease epidemiologist at U-M and NaNDA deputy director. “Policymakers, community organizations and researchers across fields use our data. We’re creating a public resource that serves many people. Now, we can expand it and work toward becoming a one-stop shop for neighborhood data.”

In addition to expanding its data collections and research, the NaNDA team will focus on these projects:

• Track respiratory illness by neighborhood: The team will use a 20% national sample of Medicare and Medicaid claims to identify communities with high rates of hospitalizations and emergency care visits for respiratory illnesses, including flu, respiratory syncytial virus and SARS-CoV-2. Researchers plan to develop a dashboard that public health departments and community organizations could use to direct resources. 
• Measure neighborhood exposure to environmental hazards: Researchers will create measures that track neighborhood exposure to wildfire smoke, high temperatures and other environmental threats. The data could help identify communities at risk as the climate changes.
• NaNDA will be enhanced by a dedicated Methods Core that addresses key challenges in neighborhood health research, including uncertainty when combining data from different sources, analyzing complex neighborhood data across places and over time, and accounting for how neighboring communities can affect one another. With support from the Scientific Data and Administrative Cores, these methods will be integrated into NaNDA data products and shared with the scientific community to support rigorous, reproducible research on neighborhoods and aging.

U-M researchers say NaNDA is a direct response to recent calls for more robust data infrastructure to expand the ability to identify local environments that shape healthy aging outcomes. 

“The lack of a national, publicly available data infrastructure that includes comprehensive, longitudinal measures of the neighborhood environment has limited our ability to measure and track the dynamic nature of local-level environmental exposures and their impact on healthy aging,” said NaNDA director Philippa Clarke.

“Most research remains siloed within specific observational or clinical studies, where neighborhood data are not consistently shared, restricting transparency, reproducibility, and comparability of findings. NaNDA was designed to address this gap by creating and sharing data on the physical, economic, demographic and social environment at multiple spatial scales, including block group, census tract, ZIP code tabulation area and county.”

NaNDA data are available for linkages with:

• The Health and Retirement Study, Panel Study of Income Dynamics and National Health and Aging Trends Study through the MiCDA enclave
• Over 40 million geocoded patient Electronic Health Records in Michigan Medicine’s Data Analytics Platform 
• Datasets from federal and state agencies, including the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey through the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers

Contact: Fernanda Pires, [email protected]