Geographic locations of all NHS3 Participants throughout follow-up, 2010-2024.
Have you ever wondered why, for a study that is mostly conducted online, we ask for your home and work mailing addresses?
One of our major research areas in NHS3 is the role of environmental exposures on your health. The places where we live, work, and play have been shown to have broad impacts on our health behaviors and on long-term health. This includes things like air pollution, the types of food establishments near work and home, and if there are amenities to make walking and biking safer. To be able to measure these exposures in your daily life, we need to ask for your address information. This allows us to conduct work on the effects of exposures in the places you spend your time, on sleep1, physical activity2, and mental health3 – with studies of many other outcomes underway.
The map above shows the residential locations of all current participants. As you can see, we have participants in all US states and Canadian provinces. This geographic diversity helps us to better understand how a wide variety of exposures that vary across the two countries impact health broadly.
So, hopefully the next time you are asked where you live or work, you’ll opt into providing this information. We will never sell your information and the address information is kept separate from your other responses on a secure system.
As always we encourage you to contact us with any questions about this or other research topics! Your feedback helps shape our questionnaires. And if you want to see our latest publications on environmental and other exposures, check out https://www.nhs3.org/about/publications/
Thank you again for your participation – we couldn’t do this research without you!
For additional reading
1 Hu CR, Wilt GE, Roscoe C, Iyer HS, Kessler WH, Laden F, Chavarro JE, Coull B,
Redline S, James P, Hart JE. Associations of seasonally available global positioning
systems-derived walkability and objectively measured sleep in the Nurses’ Health Study
3 Mobile Health Substudy. 2024. Environmental Epidemiology. 8(6): e348.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39399736/
2 Wilt GR, Roscoe CJ, Hu CR, Mehta UV, Coull BA, Hart JE, Gortmaker S, Laden F, James P. Minute level smartphone derived exposure to greenness and consumer wearable derived physical activity in a cohort of US women. 2023. Environmental Research. 237: 116864.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37648192/
3 Mehta UV, Wilt GE, Roscoe C, Okereke OI, Coull BA, James P, Laden F, Iyer HS, Yanosky JD, Kaufman J, Fiffer MR, DeVille NV, Holland I, Hart JE. The association between multiple environmental exposures and symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder in a prospective US-based cohort study. 2025. Environmental Health Perspectives. doi:10.1289/EHP14458. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40237568/