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Americans have fewer healthy days, more disparity in health outcomes, CDC data show

Health equity witnessed a “clear lack of progress” during a recent 25-year period, researchers recently wrote in JAMA Network Open.

“Health equity is an often-cited goal of public health, included among the four overarching goals of the [HHS] Healthy People 2020. Yet it is difficult to find summary assessments of national progress toward this goal,” wrote Frederick J. Zimmerman, PhD, and Nathaniel W. Anderson, BA, of the Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Using data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 1993 to 2017, they reviewed incomes, healthy days (the average of physical and mental healthy days during the prior 30 days) and health justice (a measure of the relationship between health outcomes along with income, race/ethnicity and sex) of more than 5.45 million respondents (mean age, 44.5 years; women, 58.3%; non-Latino white, 76.3%).

Zimmerman and Anderson found that for healthy days, the Health Equity Metric declined over time (year coefficient for healthy days = 0.025; 97.5% CI, 0.033 to 0.017) as did health justice (year coefficient for healthy days = 0.045; 97.5% CI, 0.053 to 0.038) and self-reported health (year coefficient = 0.035; 97.5% CI, 0.046 to 0.023).

 

Health equity witnessed a “clear lack of progress” during a recent 25-year period, researchers recently wrote in JAMA Network Open.

Source:Adobe

In addition, income disparities worsened (year coefficient for healthy days = 0.06; 97.5% CI, 0.076 to 0.044). Conversely, the health gap between black and white adults showed significant improvement (year coefficient for healthy days = 0.021; 97.5% CI, 0.012 to 0.029), as did self-reported health (year coefficient = 0.03; 97.5% CI, 0.025 to 0.035).

“Achieving widely shared goals of improving health equity will require greater effort from public health policymakers, along with their partners in medicine and the sectors that contribute to the social determinants of health,” Zimmerman and Anderson wrote. – by Janel Miller

Disclosure: Zimmerman reports he received grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation during the conduct of the study. Anderson reports no relevant financial disclosures.