The burden of disease methodology describes the gap between the best possible and actual state of health of the population. Burden of disease calculations are based on morbidity and mortality statistics, disease severity assessments and the age of persons at the time of death. As a result a more comprehensive picture of morbidity and mortality effects on population health is achieved in compari...

BACKGROUND Ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs) provide outpatient surgical services more efficiently than hospital outpatient departments, benefiting patients through lower co-payments and other expenses. We studied the influence of socioeconomic status and race on use of ASCs. METHODS From the 2005 State Ambulatory Surgery Database for Florida, a cohort of discharges for urologic, ophthalmolo...

We report a positive association between marital radius (distance between mates' birthplaces) and fertility detected in a large population. Spurious association due to socioeconomic factors is discarded by a conditional analysis involving income, education, and urbanicity. Strong evidence of consanguinity's deleterious effects affecting an entire human population is provided.

This is a study of the influence of socioeconomic factors on the state of health of older Canadians. Three years of panel data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics are used to model the transition probabilities between good and poor health. Care is taken to avoid the problem of endogeneity of income in modelling its effects, and to adjust reported income to free it from its strong asso...

This study leveraged data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (N = 243) to investigate the predictive significance of maternal sensitivity during the first 3 years of life for social and academic competence through age 32 years. Structural model comparisons replicated previous findings that early maternal sensitivity predicts social skills and academic achievement throu...

We estimate the relationship between maternal age and child outcomes, using indices aimed at measuring overall outcomes, learning outcomes, and social outcomes. In all cases, we find evidence that children of older mothers have higher outcomes. Not only do children born to mothers in their twenties do better than children born to teen mothers, but children born to mothers in their thirties do b...

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE child development is negatively influenced by multiple risk factors associated with poverty, thus indicating the importance of identifying the most vulnerable groups within populations that are apparently homogeneous regarding their state of socioeconomic deprivation. This study aimed to identify different levels of poverty in a population of low socioeconomic condition an...