Drivers of Health Archive

By Austin Frakt A common way to assess how much various factors contribute to health is to estimate how much variation in health across the country is explained by each of those factors. But explaining variation is not as useful as many may think. This is the third and final post in a series on Nancy Krieger’s ‘s American Continue reading [...]

By Austin Frakt I wrote about Nancy Krieger’s insightful American Journal of Public Health paper in a previous post. In this second of three posts, I will continue to unpack some of the content of her article, focusing on the distinction between correlation and causation. Krieger’s paper is titled “Health Equity and the Fallacy of Treating Causes of Population Continue reading [...]

By Austin Frakt In 2017, Nancy Krieger, Professor of Social Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, published a truly insightful paper in the American Journal of Public Health in which she raised several conceptual problems with allocating health outcomes to contributions from risk factors. This is the first of three posts that will Continue reading [...]

By Austin Frakt The next public meeting of the Drivers of Health project will be held in Detroit on September 11. Housing, education, and access and quality of health care will be the focus. Why? This post explains. The first public meeting of the Drivers of Health project, held in Princeton, NJ on June 17, covered social Continue reading [...]

By Austin Frakt In late June, Public Agenda published a report on perspectives of low-income parents on pediatric screening for social determinants of health. A key conclusion suggests a substantial challenge. One of the report’s conclusions is: The low-income parents in our focus groups understood their children were affected by the social determinants of health for which Continue reading [...]

By Austin Frakt Social determinants of health comes up frequently in health policy news. Here are quotes from six stories that caught my eye over the last few months. 1. Google’s life-extension spinoff teamed up with Ancestry to study 54 million family trees — and learned that a surprising factor helps determine how long we live, Continue reading [...]

By Kate Raphael There’s a lot of evidence that social determinants of health are especially important in the early years of life. Experiences, resources, and opportunities available during childhood can influence health in ways that persist through adulthood. For these reasons, it’s especially important to evaluate the effectiveness of Early Childhood Programs, those interventions targeted Continue reading [...]

By Kate Raphael Housing significantly affects health. In our homes, we experience the intersection of many health-related factors, and when we spend so much time in this environment, the cumulative effects of where we live can have long-term health consequences. A growing body of literature documents many of these links between housing and health, but the Continue reading [...]

By Austin Frakt The following is an interview with Paula M. Lantz, PhD, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, James B. Hudak Professor of Health Policy, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan. Dr. Lantz is also a member of the Drivers of Health project advisory committee. This is the third post in a series of Continue reading [...]

By Austin Frakt For low-income renters and residents in the U.S., access to affordable housing has strong ties to health care spending. People faced with high rent and housing costs often forego preventive care in an effort to lessen their already significant financial burdens. For these individuals, avoiding necessary treatment can lead to catastrophic spending on Continue reading [...]