Urban green spaces in the proximity of residences can reduce the effect of socioeconomic inequalities in sports practice among teenage girls.

Background: We studied if proximity of urban green spaces to residences reduces the socioeconomic inequalities in sports practice, evaluating 17-year-old girls (n = 722) from EPITeen cohort, Porto, Portugal.

Methods: The shortest routes from residences to urban green spaces were calculated using the street network from Geographic Information System. Distances were classified as: ≤400, >400 to ≤800, and >800 m. Parental education was used as a proxy of socioeconomic status (SES). We used chi-square test to compare proportions of teenagers practicing sports per SES, stratified by classes of distances to urban green spaces and logistic regression to estimate the association between sports practice and SES through odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals.

Results: Strong inequalities were found. Girls from low SES have ≥75% less odds of sports practice (reference: high SES), regardless of the distance to urban green spaces. As distances are lowering the socioeconomic inequalities in the sports practice between girls from high and medium SES diminishes, being the OR 0.42 (0.22-0.80) at ≥800 m, 0.51 (0.24-1.09) at ≥400 to ≤800 m, and 0.63 (0.29-1.37) at ≤400 m.

Conclusion: At closer distances inequalities in the proportion of sports practice between high and medium SES vanishes, but remain to low SES.