AN ANALYSIS of 2021 Australian census data has shown that socioeconomic position is a major risk factor for chronic disease, but the direction, magnitude and consistency of the effect differs by disease, socioeconomic measure, age and sex.
The team looked at the prevalence of ten chronic diseases - arthritis, asthma, cancer, dementia, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, lung disease, mental health conditions and stroke - and how they varied according to age, sex and socio-economic position.
The researchers reported that the prevalence of nine out of the 10 included diseases increased with socioeconomic disadvantage.
The exception was cancer, the prevalence of which decreased with increasing socioeconomic disadvantage in most sexspecific age groups.
In the case of breast cancer, for example, there is a link with alcohol consumption, which is greater in higher socio-economic groups, while breast cancer screening is also taken up more in this group, resulting in better survival.
For other conditions, the researchers suggested that smoking - which is more common among people in lower socioeconomic positions - could be an important influence on the prevalence of several chronic diseases, including lung disease, for which the increase in prevalence with decreasing socio-economic position was particularly large.
Apart from smoking, other factors that could contribute to the socioeconomic position-disease gradients reported are health behaviours, access to health care, nutritional status, health literacy, housing conditions, workload (including shift work) and psychological stress.
Among other findings were that changes in disease prevalence by socio-economic position were often more marked for women than for men, and the influence of socioeconomic position is less marked for people over 80 years of age.
One unexpected finding was that the burden of chronic disease was not largest for people without formal educational qualifications.
However, this does not necessarily indicate that they were healthier - the authors suggested that it may be due to lower health literacy and health careseeking behaviour, which in turn leads to lower rates of disease detection.
"Groups at particular risk of these chronic diseases should be targeted by health interventions for reducing socioeconomic inequalities in health," the researchers concluded.
Read the study HERE.
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