Stress, SES and Poverty
If you want to increase the odds of living a long and healthy life, don't be poor. Poverty is associated with increased risks of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, ulcers, rheumatoid disorders, psychiatric diseases, and a number of types of cancer. (Location 5956)
SES — typically measured by a combination of income, occupation, housing conditions, and education. (Location 5946)
In six-and eight-year-old children, there was already a tendency for lower-SES kids to have elevated Glucocorticoids levels. By age ten, there was a step-wise gradient, with low-SES kids averaging almost double the circulating glucocorticoids as the highest SES kids. (Location 5948)
A 1967 study showed that the poorer you are judged to be (based on the neighborhood you live in, your home, your appearance), the less likely paramedics are to try to revive you on the way to the hospital. (Location 5987)
For every step lower in the SES ladder, there is worse health — and the lower you get in the SES hierarchy, the bigger is each step of worsening health. This was a point made screamingly clear in the Whitehall studies of Michael Marmot of University College of London. (Location 6003)
Different causes of death, but same SES gradient, same relationship between SES and health. Which tells you that the gradient arises less from disease than from social class. Thus the “roots of the SES health gradient lie beyond the reach of medical therapy.” (Location 5970)
In the Whitehall studies, smoking, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and level of exercise explain away only about a third of the SES gradient. For the same risk factors and same lack of protective factors, throw in poverty and you’re more likely to get sick. (Location 6044)
When one examines the SES gradient for individual diseases, the strongest gradients occur for diseases with the greatest sensitivity to stress — heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and psychiatric disorders. (Location 6062)
Food, being poor is not as bad for you as feeling poor. (Location 6098)
⇒ Predictability and Control
The more income inequality there is in a society, the worse the health and mortality rates. Income inequality predicts higher infant mortality rates across European countries. Income inequality predicts mortality rates across all ages in the United States. (Location 6111)
Our perceived SES may arise mostly out of our local community, but our modern world makes it possible to have our noses rubbed in it by a local community that stretches around the globe. (Location 6133)
==In societies that have more income equality, both the poor and the wealthy are healthier than their counterparts in a less equal society with the same average income.== (Location 6153)
Trust requires reciprocity, and reciprocity requires equality. In contrast, hierarchy is about domination, not symmetry and equality. By definition, you can’t have a society with both dramatic income inequality and lots of social capital. (Location 6171)
The more economically unequal a society, the more crime — assault, robbery, and particularly homicide. Income inequality is consistently a better predictor of crime than poverty per se. (Location 6188)
The bigger the distance between the wealthy and the average, the less benefit the wealthy will feel from expenditures on the public good. Instead, they derive much more benefit by spending the same (taxed) money on their private good — a gated community, private schools, private health insurance. (Location 6197)
What has happened to Russia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union? A massive increase in income inequality and crime, a decline in absolute wealth — and an overall decline in life expectancy that is unprecedented in an industrialized society. (Location 6210)
Do poor humans have a disproportionate share of disease? The answer was “Yes, yes, over and over.” Regardless of gender or age or race. In societies with universal health care and those without. When agriculture arrived and humans invented poverty, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world. (Location 6232)
see also
Tags: neurobiology science sociology
Superlink: 051 ☣Neurobiology 050 🧠Neuroscience
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17 Socioeconomic Status and Health
Erstellt: 05-04-26 10:00