Introduction:

Rapid urbanization and intense human activity have turned cities into a focus of pollutants emissions, thus generating all sorts of environmental and public health problems involving heavy metals.

Objectives:

To identify and analyze the physical factors (PF) involved in the accumulation of heavy metals in road sediments to enable decision-making processes directed to control heavy metal pollution from a urban public health perspective.

Materials and methods:

An international systematic review was conducted in related scientific literature published between January 1, 1970 and December 31, 2015. Springer, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar were the consulted databases. A citation frequency index (Q) was developed to establish an order of relevance of the detected PF, while cluster analysis, Student's t-test, Pearson's correlation coefficient and linear regression tests were used to study the correlation between the variables identified. Finally, 79 documents were selected for the construction of the manuscript.

Results:

The studies cited precipitation (Q1), land use (Q2) and traffic (Q2) as dominant PF. Therefore, a comprehensive view for public health management should consider two scenarios and their corresponding dominant PFs: meteorological (PF: precipitation) and anthropogenic (PF: land use and traffic).

Conclusion:

A different intervention order is suggested for the institutions in charge of controlling heavy metal pollution and public health management in urban areas.

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