Rising premature mortality in the UK’s persistently deprived areas: Only a Scottish phenomenon?

In the international literature, many studies find strong relationships between area-based measures of deprivation and mortality. In the UK, mortality rates have generally fallen in recent decades but the life expectancy gap between the most and least deprived areas has widened, with a number of Scottish studies highlighting increased mortality rates in deprived areas especially in Glasgow. However, these studies relate health outcomes at different time points against period-specific measures of deprivation which may not be comparable over time. Using longitudinal deprivation measures where levels of area deprivation are made comparable over time, a recent study demonstrated how levels of mortality change in relation to changing or persistent levels of (non-) deprivation over time. The results showed that areas which were persistently deprived in Scotland experienced a rise in premature mortality rates by 9.5% between 1981 and 2001.