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Social epidemiology focuses on the patterns in morbidity and mortality rates that emerge as a result of social characteristics. While an individual's lifestyle choices or family history may place him or her at an increased risk for developing certain illnesses, there are social inequalities in health that cannot be explained by individual factors. [1]
Major research challenges in social epidemiology include tools to strengthen causal inference, [5] [6] methods to test theoretical frameworks such as Fundamental Cause Theory, [7] translation of evidence to systems and policy changes that will improve population health, [8] and mostly obscure causal mechanisms between exposures and outcomes. [9]
There are high incidence rates in many other world regions. Roughly 61% of American adults drank in 2007, and 21% of current drinkers consumed five or more drinks at one point in the last year. There have also been 22,073 alcohol induced deaths in the United States in the past year, about 13,000 of which were related to liver disease. [37]
The largest three poverty-related diseases (PRDs)—AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis—account for 18% of diseases in poor countries. [56] The disease burden of treatable childhood diseases in high-mortality, poor countries is 5.2% in terms of disability-adjusted life years but just 0.2% in the case of advanced countries. [56]
The idea of syndemics is that no disease exists in isolation and that often population health can be understood through a confluence of factors (such as climate change or social inequality) that produces multiple health conditions that afflict some populations and not others. [2]
[1] Social determinants of disease can be attributed to broad social forces such as racism, gender inequality, poverty, violence, and war. [4] This is important because health quality, health distribution, and social protection of health in a population affect the development status of a nation. [ 1 ]
Health disparities, which are largely caused by unequal access to healthcare, can be defined as “a difference in which disadvantaged social groups such as the poor, racial/ethnic minorities, women and other groups who have persistently experienced social disadvantage or discrimination systematically experience worse health or greater health ...
[50] [51] Different populations are considered "high-risk" or "low-risk" groups for various diseases due to the probability of that particular population being more exposed to certain risk factors. Beyond genetic factors, history and culture, as well as current environmental and social conditions, influence a certain population's risk for ...