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 [...]

In a paper published in Health Affairs today, a team of HGHI researchers reports a surprising finding: There appears to be a strong, positive relationship between social and healthcare spending. That is, countries that spend more on social programs also end up spending more on health care. 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 [...]