Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769

Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

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2003 - 20102

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Author: search.filters.author.Adler, Nancy ESubject: search.filters.subject.Disparities

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    Health disparities across the lifespan: meaning, methods, and mechanisms.
    (2010) Adler, Nancy E; Stewart, Judith
    Over the past two decades, exponential growth of empirical research has fueled markedly increased concern about health disparities. In this paper, we show the progression of research on socioeconomic status (SES) and health through several eras. The first era reflected an implicit threshold model of the association of poverty and health. The second era produced evidence for a graded association between SES and health where each improvement in education, income, occupation, or wealth is associated with better health outcomes. Moving from description of the association to exploration of pathways, the third era focused on mechanisms linking SES and health, whereas the fourth era expanded on mechanisms to consider multilevel influences, and a fifth era added a focus on interactions among factors, not just their main effects or contributions as mediators. Questions from earlier eras remain active areas of research, while later eras add depth and complexity.
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    Community Preventive Services- Do We Know What We Need to Know to Improve Health and Reduce Disparities?
    (2003) Adler, Nancy E
    Healthy People 2010,1 which lays out goals for the health of the U.S. population in the next decade, establishes two overarching aims: (1) to increase the quality and years of healthy life, and (2) to eliminate health disparities. Unfortunately, these aims are often in conflict. Many improvements in health care, including preventive care, that increase quality and years of healthy life will increase, not decrease, disparities. New technologies and information about prevention are more available to those with more education, income, and other resources. This differential access allows the more advantaged to enjoy the benefits more rapidly compared to the rest of the population. Thus, while improved health care and prevention have contributed to dramatic drops in mortality over time, these benefits have not been equally conferred, and larger gradients in mortality exist now than did earlier.