Withdrawn - 03. The Impact of Neighborhood Food Insecurity on Type-2 Diabetes Prevalence Amid Measurement Error

Disparities in healthy eating relate to disparities in well-being, which leads to disproportionate rates of diseases like type-2 diabetes in communities that face more challenges in accessing nutritious food. These challenges can be driven by individual- and neighborhood-level factors, like a person's distance from home to the nearest grocery store or the socioeconomic status of their community, respectively. Quantifying these disparities is key to developing targeted interventions, and there are limitations with the currently available methods and data that we are working to resolve. Namely, available data on disease rates are usually aggregate, which smooths over details about the individuals and communities within them. Further, aggregate disease data often comprise small area estimates, which carry additional uncertainty. In this project, we investigate the relationship between patients' food environment and the risk of diabetes using individual-level data from electronic health records at a large academic medical center. While this project used various health disparities methods and measures, this presentation will focus on quantifying whether patients with more food insecure households in their neighborhood face a higher burden of prevalent type-2 diabetes. Still, we face measurement error in the food environment variable (food insecurity) since they are collected using inaccurate distance calculations and survey data. Finally, we discuss the impact of using error-prone food environment measures to detect health disparities in these data.

Measurement Error

Food Insecurity

Type 2 diabetes

Health disparities 

Beginner

Community

Women in Statistics and Data Science 2025