Less-educated persons have worse cardiovascular health. We compare the educational gradients in three disease-specific health measures (biomarkers, self-reported doctors’ diagnoses and cause-specific mortality) in order to compare their relevance in different stages of the disease process. We...

We aim to give an overview of the state of the art of causal analysis of demographic issues related to morbidity and mortality. We will systematically introduce strategies to identify causal mechanisms, which are inherently linked to panel data from observational surveys and population...

A person's socioeconomic status (SES) can affect health (social causation) and health can affect SES (health selection). The findings for each of these pathways may depend on how SES is measured. We study (1) whether social causation or health selection is more important for overall health...

Differences in mortality between groups with different socioeconomic positions (SEP) are well-established, but the relative contribution of different SEP measures is unclear. This study compares the correlation between three SEP dimensions and mortality, and investigates differences between...

Background: It has become increasingly common in multiple purpose general population surveys to integrate different kinds of biomarker in the data collection process.Objective: In this article we test the predictive power of five different functional forms of CVD-related biomarkers for all-cause...

Health differences which correspond to socioeconomic status (SES) can be attributed to three causal mechanisms: SES affects health (social causation), health affects SES (health selection), and common background factors influence both SES and health (indirect selection). Using retrospective...

The widely established health differences between people with greater economic resources and those with fewer resources can be attributed to both social causation (material factors affecting health) and health selection (health affecting material wealth). Each of these pathways may have...

Socioeconomic status (SES) and health during childhood have been consistently observed to be associated with health in old age in many studies. However, the exact mechanisms behind these two associations have not yet been fully understood. The key challenge is to understand how childhood SES and...

This contribution presents systematic biases in the process of generating health data by using a step-by-step explanation of the DISEASE FILTER, a heuristic instrument that we designed in order to better understand and evaluate health data. The systematic bias in health data generally varies by...