Objective social inequalities in health are believed to arise in part because individuals make use of social and economic resources in order to improve survival. In recent years, health literacy has received increased attention as a factor that can help explain differences in health outcomes. However, examination of life course predictors of health literacy has been limited. Methods life cour...

Screening questions have been proposed as practical tools for detecting limited functional health literacy, but have achieved only moderate accuracy in previous studies. We hypothesized that a combination of screening questions and demographic characteristics could better predict a patient's functional health literacy. Three hundred and twenty-two hospital users from São Paulo, Brazil, were int...

Health and literacy share an interesting relationship. The complexities of the relationship between literacy and health need to be recognized by policy-makers and practitioners to dispel myths, reduce stigma attached to low literacy, and empower disadvantaged groups. As we engage in building knowledge in the field, there is a need for multi-sectoral collaboration, both quantitative and qualitat...

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (2001) recently asserted that speech-language pathologists can and should play an important role in promoting literacy for young children with communicative impairments. Early literacy screening provides a valuable tool for speech-language pathologists to use for the timely detection of difficulties in literacy achievement. In addition, results o...

This paper argues for extending the scope of applying data mining towards making it a means to help people better understand, reflect and influence the information and information-producing and -consuming activities that they are surrounded by in today’s knowledge societies. Data mining is thereby seen as a means to furthering information literacy and specifically critical literacy. We discuss ...

Although entertainment-education narratives are increasingly being used to communicate health information to a diversity of populations, there is limited evidence examining the use of narrative health education videos in low compared with adequate health literacy populations. There are also very few studies directly comparing narrative materials to more traditional, non-narrative materials. Bec...

Health care providers, including medical residents, often lack adequate knowledge and skills to work effectively with patients who have limited health literacy. Little is known about the degree to which medical residents are trained to communicate effectively with people who have limited health literacy. This study aimed to assess the status of health literacy training for physicians in U.S. fa...

In public discourse, literacy has long been associated with schooling. Talk about literacy crises is often accompanied by calls for better schools and more rigorous curricula, and images of reading and writing are closely connected to school-based or essayist forms of literacy. However, when we widen the lens of what we consider literacy and literate activities, homes, communities, and workplac...

Limited health literacy is associated with worse executive function, but the association between limited health literacy and decline in executive function has not been established because of a lack of longitudinal studies. The authors aimed to examine this association by studying a prospective cohort in the setting of a randomized controlled trial to promote walking in older adults. Participant...

Health literacy has come to play a critical role in health education and promotion, yet it is poorly understood in adolescents and few measurement tools exist. Standardized instruments to measure health literacy in adults assume it to be a derivative of general literacy. This paper reports on the development and the early-stage validation of a health literacy tool for high school students that ...