Health of people living on urbanized areas

Lots of chemical and physical features of urbanized areas affect the heath of urban people. However, that list will be incomplete if we don’t take into consideration social settings of cities.

First of all, those settings include redundant contacts and information urban people have to face. Urban environment makes heightened demands of adaptive capabilities of human, first of all, of the ability to address constantly changing conditions quickly and suitably.
Informational overload and overstressing, that are typical for modern cities, cause the state of mental overstrain which can provoke the most widespread chronic diseases of the present-day human: idiopathic hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary disease, brain ischemia, ulcer disease.
High concentration of people is a precondition for emergence of epidemics in cities, as well as for emotional stress. Stress causes increase in the rate of cardiovascular diseases, diseases of the nervous system and other pathological deviations.
Sedentary life of urban people also causes a set of biochemical shifts in the organism. It is the risk factor for atherosclerosis, idiopathic hypertension, and coronary disease.
Also, climatic conditions of urbanized areas and physicochemical pollution of the urban environment negatively affect people health.
On the one hand, urbanization is accompanied with the increase of the life standards and the decrease of the overall sickness rate of urban people. On the other hand, it is associated with emergence of new diseases and growth of diseases which were not wide-spread in the past. Among all the diseases, chronical and lasting ones get more influence. All in all, urban conditions result in higher rate of cardiovascular, pulmonary, oncological and mental diseases among urban people as compared to rural ones.
The sickness rate of people in large cities is considered to be linked substantially with the environmental pollution. Atmospheric pollution plays the main role because human contacts with the air longer and more intensive than with water and food. Moreover, lots of chemicals influence the organism more active when they come through respiratory organs.
Chemical pollution of water mainly causes diseases of digestive and excretory systems (gastritis, gastric and duodenal ulcers, cholelithiasis, urolithiasis and nephritis).
Microelement composition of organisms of urban people is notable for heightened concentration of some toxic elements and low concentration of some bio elements. For example, heightened lead concentration is often associated with the decrease in zinc concentration (zinc is one of the most important microelements).
One more characteristic feature of the urban environment is noise. It also affects human health negatively. Everyday exposure to weak noise worsens general well-being, lowers the strength of attention, promotes development of neuroses and causes loss of hearing acuity. Urban noise affects physical growth and development of newborns whose mothers live on the territories with high level of noise.
The set of abnormalities induced in the organism by electromagnetic fields is called radio-wave disease. Its main symptoms are headache, undue fatiguability and irritability, sleep disorders, causeless anxiety, nervousness. Electromagnetic fields influence embryonal development increasing the risk of congenital malformations.