Researchers report trends in socioeconomic health inequalities in Europe before and after the 2008 financial crisis. In the United States, rising mortality and morbidity among people with low education have led to increasing health inequalities since 2000. Johan Mackenbach and colleagues assessed recent trends in health inequalities in European countries, as well as possible impacts of the 2008 financial crisis on health inequalities, based on mortality data from 1980 to 2014 for 17 countries and self-reported morbidity data from 2002 to 2014 for 350,000 survey respondents from 27 countries. The authors found that in western European countries, mortality declined steadily among people of high and low education levels throughout the period studied, with no interruption in this trend during the financial crisis. In eastern European countries, mortality among people of low education levels began to decline in recent years after having increased in previous decades, while a decline in less-than-good self-assessed health among men with low education accelerated. In the countries most severely affected by the financial crisis, declines in self-assessed health slowed following the crisis, but did so equally for people of low and high education levels. Crisis-related economic variables, such as declining national income and rising unemployment, were not associated with widening health inequalities. The results suggest that European countries avoided short-term aggravation of health inequalities from the financial crisis, according to the authors.
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Article #18-00028: "Trends in health inequalities in 27 European countries," by Johan P. Mackenbach et al.
MEDIA CONTACT: Johan P. Mackenbach, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, NETHERLANDS; tel: +31-107038460; e-mail: <j.mackenbach@erasmusmc.nl>
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences