Associations of Tobacco Retailer Density and Proximity with Adult Tobacco Use and Health Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis

Tobacco use is a leading cause of preventable death in high income countries. The tobacco industry markets its products in ways to increase their availability, accessibility, and ubiquity in the retail environment. This marketing is targeted at communities in ways that can increase social inequities. Prior systematic reviews have identified and described the literature on the role of tobacco marketing on behavior (Robertson, Cameron, McGee, Marsh, & Hoek, 2016; Robertson, McGee, Marsh, & Hoek, 2015), on inequities in the availability of tobacco marketing (Lee, Henriksen, Rose, Moreland-Russell, & Ribisl, 2015), and on the role of tobacco retailer density on adolescent health behaviors (Gwon, DeGuzman, Kulbok, & Jeong, 2017). One systematic review and meta-analysis has looked at adolescent smoking behaviors in relation to tobacco retailer density (Finan et al., 2018) and one at volume of marketing in neighborhoods (Primack, Bost, Land, & Fine, 2007). Understanding the impact of tobacco retailer density and proximity on adult tobacco use behaviors as well as on the scale of social inequities is important given that there are available policy mechanisms for reducing the density and proximity of tobacco retailers (Ackerman, Etow, Bartel, & Ribisl, 2017; Myers, Hall, Isgett, & Ribisl, 2015) and these have potential to influence social inequities (Ribisl et al., 2017). This Dataset provides supplemental files and data. The systematic review is registered in PROSPERO #CRD42019124984