The interplay of a quartet of sex, marital status, education, and race is linked to an 18 year lifespan gap for US citizens, and while no one factor is more influential than any of the others, the more of these influential factors a person has, the higher their risk of an earlier death, finds research published in the open access journal BMJ Open. But a simple scoring system based on these characteristics can help overcome this complexity to identify those most at risk, say the researchers. Individual risks and genetic factors explain part of the differences in health and death, but the evidence increasingly points to the role of social determinants-;the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age-;in shaping health, explain the researchers.
But when it comes to identifying those groups at high risk of early death, using only one of these factors often masks wide lifespan inequalities within these groups, and various factors influence health in different ways, making it difficult to identify a person at risk, they add. To better understand how these inequalities act in tandem with one another, and to identify people at high risk of an early death from all, and specific, causes more accurately, the researchers looked at lifespan differences associated with 4 key social determinants, with the aim of drawing up a scoring system. They extracted information on registered deaths and population numbers from national statistics and census data for the period 2015-19.