This paper proposes a behavioural model of inequality of opportunity in health that integrates John Roemer's framework of inequality of opportunity with the Grossman model of health capital and demand for health. The model generates a recursive system of equations for health and lifestyles, which is then jointly estimated by full information maximum likelihood with freely correlated error terms...

Training medical students to understand the effects of culture and marginalization on health outcomes is important to the future health of increasingly diverse populations. We devised and evaluated a short training module on working with diversity to challenge students' thinking about the role of both patient and practitioner culture in health outcomes. The workshop combined didactic teaching a...

Several recent studies have made the provocative claim that income inequality is an important determinant of population health. The primary evidence for this hypothesis is the repeated finding--across countries and across U.S. states--that there is an association between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes. However, most of these studies examine only a single cross section of data a...

Explanations for immigrant health outcomes often invoke culture through the use of the concept of acculturation. The over reliance on cultural explanations for immigrant health outcomes has been the topic of growing debate, with the critics' main concern being that such explanations obscure the impact of structural factors on immigrant health disparities. In this paper, we highlight the shortco...

A population-based study was conducted to validate gender- and age-specific indexes of socio-economic status (SES) and to investigate the associations between these indexes and a range of health outcomes in 2 age cohorts of women. Data from 11,637 women aged 45 to 50 and 9,510 women aged 70 to 75 were analyzed. Confirmatory factor analysis produced four domains of SES among the mid-aged cohort ...

Article history: Received 5 June 2009 Received in revised form 28 October 2009 Accepted 27 November 2009 Available online 6 January 2010 This study examined the degree to which differences in average IQ across the 50 states was associated with differences in health statistics independent of differences in wealth, health care expenditures and racial composition. Results show that even after cont...

Fundamental to the study and practice of nutrition is the understanding that nutritional status and nutrition-related health are not just the result of exposure to individual nutrients found in the diet, but also the complexity of interactions between nutrients and non-nutrient components in foods. This has prompted the relatively recent study of diet quality as an index for assessing the relat...

The same study designs are used to document the magnitude of the influence of currently used and of previously used treatments on health outcomes. However, because randomized trials rarely are utilized to study cessation of treatment, most of what we know about the experience of former users of a given treatment comes from cohort and case-control studies. These studies generally compare former ...

Given the complexity surrounding various interactions among health determinants and the challenge of being able to adequately describe the dynamic processes through which health determinants have their effects, the purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual overview demonstrating the effects of socioeconomic status and cumulative disadvantage on producing health disparities across the lif...

The present study examined the relationship between the hardiness components of commitment, control, and challenge, and the experience of physical and psychological symptoms in a sample of 150 (75 male, 75 female) adolescents. A measure of psychosocial stress was included to permit an examination of whether the hardiness components interact with stress in predicting health outcomes. Analyses re...