OBJECTIVE To assess the health literacy of US parents and explore the role of health literacy in mediating child health disparities. METHODS A cross-sectional study was performed for a nationally representative sample of US parents from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy. Parent performance on 13 child health-related tasks was assessed by simple weighted analyses. Logistic regress...

Young adulthood is a unique and critical period of development during which unmet health needs and disparities in access to appropriate care, health status, and mortality rates are high. This is a time when purposeful prevention and intervention strategiesmay still alter trajectories and decrease threats to health along the adult life course. The Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine provi...

BACKGROUND Several studies suggest that socioeconomic status affects (SES) affects self-rated health (SRH), both in Greece and internationally. However, prior research mainly uses objective measures of SES, instead of subjective evaluations of individuals' social status. Based on this, this paper aims to examine (a) the impact of the economic dowturn on SRH in Greece and (b) the relationship be...

he current debate about health care reform has centered primarily on controlling the cost of health care and health insurance access. The third essential component of health policy — health care quality — must be addressed as well. Despite a lack of media attention, health care quality initiatives are significant components of health care reform. However, racial and ethnic health care dispariti...

Health disparities in Japan are attracting increasing attention. Temporal trends in health disparities should be continuously monitored using multiple indices of socioeconomic status (SES) and health-related outcomes. We explored changes in socioeconomic differences in the health of Japanese adults during 2000-2010. The data was taken from the Japanese General Social Surveys, the cross-sectiona...

Medicine and epidemiology currently dominate the study of the strong association between socioeconomic status and mortality. Socioeconomic status typically is viewed as a causally irrelevant "confounding variable" or as a less critical variable marking only the beginning of a causal chain in which intervening risk factors are given prominence. Yet the association between socioeconomic status an...