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The variation in the incidence of cancer between geographic areas and socio-economic classes is outlined. In many instances the differences in the incidence can be attributed to differences in life-style factors such as smoking, diet, sexual habits, and the reproductive history of women. The role of smoking as an explanation of the variation in the risk of lung cancer between occupational groups is emphasized.
Does mood vary as a function of age, sec, or situation? In four investigations, 6,452 persons aged 4 to 99 were interrupted at leisure, at home, at school, and at work and asked to assess their mood as being happy, neutral, or unhappy. Moods of happiness and neutrality were each reported about 45% and unhappiness about 10% of the time. Females more frequently reported moods of happiness or unhappiness than males, while mood did not vary as a function of age. Persons at leisure reported more affectively pleasant moods than those at work, at home, or at school. Persons of higher socioeconomic status reported more happy moods than those of lower status. In another study, a class of 255 students was administered various personality scales and then interrupted 21 times over the course of the quarter and their mood indexed. Tested religiosity negatively correlated with frequency of pleasant moods, the Barron Ego-Strength Scale was uncorrelated with frequency of kind of mood, and the Eysenck Neuroticism Scale correlated with frequency of unpleasant moods.
We examined the demographic distribution of 102 subjects with attention deficits in the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) (Wechsler, 1974) standardization sample. Neither age nor occupational status was significant; males were overrepresented (3:1); and the West was overrepresented by 50%, largely due to the relatively high proportion of females in the West who appeared within the attention deficit sample (41% in West vs. 19% in the rest of the nation). Replication is encouraged.
This study examines how education and employment situation contribute to the association between a classification of occupational class based on skill assets and mortality from different causes of death. Data were obtained by linking records from the 1996 population census for Spanish men aged 35-64 residing in Madrid with 1996 and 1997 mortality records. The risk of mortality was higher in skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers than in higher and lower managerial and professional workers. Adjusting for educational level substantially decreased the magnitude of the gradient. The decrease in the gradient after adjusting for employment situation was much smaller. Except in the case of mortality from respiratory diseases, the mortality gradient disappeared after adjusting for both variables. These results show that education and, to a much lesser degree, employment situation explain part of the social gradient observed in mortality from all causes and from broad causes of death, except from respiratory diseases.
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This study was done to test the validity of two hypotheses of why children, and especially black children, of families of the poverty sector commonly fail in school. Sociologists deny for them either a cognitive or a linguistic deficit, and blame their failures on having to master the unfamiliar dialect of standard English while learning to read. The authors, on the other hand, blame the failures on inadequacies of early preschool experience that result in such deficits as one in semantic mastery of various elementary abstractions. In 1970-1971, 87 four-year-old students (58 black and 29 white) of Head Start and 33 of nursery school were examined with a five part test of number identification. In 1971-1972, the study was repeated with 69 four-year-olds of Head Start and 46 of the nursery school. A much smaller percentage of Head Start than of nursery school identify the numbers of blocks from 2 through 4 by either the heard or spoken mode of number identification. For numbers 5 and 6, most children of both classes fail. The evidence for a semantic deficit for number is very strong. The evidence indicates also a deficit in the span of apprehension and suggests the existence of class differences in the power of examiner demands for heard and for spoken identification to elicit the counting strategy. Evidence of sex differences in semantic mastery of number is absent, and among Head Start children, race differences lack statistical significance. These findings are highly dissonant with the contention of the sociolinguists that no cognitive or linguistic deficits exist and uncovering them can be helpful in guiding compensatory education.
Saugstad (1989) recently proposed a neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia and manic depressive illness that emphasizes the importance of biological maturation. Early maturation is proposed to be critical to manic-depressive illness and late maturation to schizophrenia. There are three goals of the comments that follow: (1) to place the neurodevelopmental theory in a broader context of ongoing research in sex differences in psychopathology; (2) to address some conceptual ambiguities in the model, especially with respect to within-schizophrenia comparisons; and (3) to offer a suggestion for a critical test of a maturation hypothesis of schizophrenia.
A self-administered cross-sectional survey was used to assess the relative impact of a health promotion program on blue- and white-collar workers of both sexes. The program operated in five different types of organizations and consisted of exercise, nutrition, smoking, stress, breast and testicular self-examination. Significant positive improvements occurred on at least five health behaviors for female workers reporting and four behaviors for male workers, with the greatest gains among blue-collar women. Several study limitations are noted suggesting a cautious interpretation of the results.
The extent and quality of prenatal care are important for the health of women and their babies. Recent studies suggest that women lack adequate prenatal care in contemporary Turkey. This paper uses regression models to examine the major factors impacting on the access of women to prenatal care through the 1993 Turkish Demographic and Health Survey. The findings suggest that after controlling for class, ethnicity does not explain the likelihood of a woman's access to prenatal care, partly because the predominant patriarchal ideology in Turkey determines women's access to education, which in turn determines their access to prenatal care. It can be argued that unless women's socioeconomic status in the family improves, their access to health care in general and prenatal care in particular will not increase significantly.
The literature on success neurosis has expanded in recent years to include a consideration of preoedipal as well as oedipal factors. Typically, success neurosis is considered to be a symptomatic result of complex intrapsychic phenomena, whether they be at the oedipal and/or preoedipal level. Having previously considered that success neurosis can also be determined by internalized representations of "real" factors, such as racism and poverty (Holmes, in press, b) the author here considers how these factors become primary intrapsychic building blocks of success neurosis through their negative impact on the components of success in the self and the ego.
Physical performance of preschool children and elementary school pupils (N = 2309, age: 61 to 108 mo.) was related to characteristics of physical growth and cognitive performance and to ecological variables. Correlations between measures of physical growth and physical performance and between physical and cognitive performance were positive and significant. Measurements of physical fitness and body coordination increased across ages. Significant differences were found between boys and girls; however, boys exceeded on some items, girls on others. Children of higher socioeconomic status performed better than children of lower status and children who participated in sports outside school outperformed those who did not.
In a sample of approx. 19 000 Polish schoolgirls from the three largest cities of the Upper Silesia conurbation, menarcheal age was studied in relation to parental education (four levels) and father's occupation (12 groups). Menarcheal age tends to increase with decreasing parental education, although the gradient is not steep. When families below a certain level of economic standing are discarded from the best-educated and the least-well-educated groups, mean menarcheal age, surprisingly, decreases much more in the former than in the latter. Mean menarcheal ages for girls from different occupational groups range from 12.82 to 13.30 years and form the following sequence, in increasing order: managers--police--non-technical professionals--engineers, technicians and foremen--skilled industrial workers and small businessmen--unskilled workers--coal-miners. Mean menarcheal age for an occupational group is strongly dependent upon the group's socio-economic status, the latter being defined in terms of parental education, family income, family size, and dwelling conditions. However, daughters of men in the police force mature significantly earlier, and daughters of coal-miners significantly later, than would be expected from each group's rank in socio-economic status. The findings are compared with the results of other recent studies of social gradients in menarcheal age in Poland.
The incidence of large-bowel cancer in Cali, Colombia, for 1962-71 shows the upper socioeconomic classes to be a higher risk. This is the first report of a socioeconomic gradient in risk for this site. The gradients were most marked for cancer of the ascending through rectosigmoid colon and were minimal for cancer of the cecum and rectum. The Cali experience presents several parallels with information derived from comparisons of developed and developing countries and also appears consistent with recent information on the possible role of dietary factors in bowel cancer.
The dependence of early occuring minimal brain dysfunction on the standard of living was tested. 1355 6-15 year old patients with psychosomatic and psychiatric disorders were examined and divided into the 3 groups: "no brain dysfunction", "suspected brain dysfunction" and "brain dysfunction" (diagnosed medically). A highly significant correlation between brain dysfunction and a low socio-economic status--evaluated in terms of living conditions and the fathers occupation--was found. A similar dependence of both, early mortality and morbidity on the living standard of different groups of the population is described in the literature.
Data from a survey of office encounters in general practice in the Hamilton health district reveal a lower than average use of primary medical care by children of lower socioeconomic background. In comparison, a higher than expected level of medical contact was recorded for Maoris in this age group. Both groups, however, show a higher rate of contact for more severe symptoms. Explanation for this pattern may be sought in variations in morbidity experience and in differentials both in the response to symptoms and in access to care. The apparently lower level of primary medical contact recorded among nonMaori children in the 0-4 age group is particularly noteworthy.
BACKGROUND: Self-rated health is a commonly used measure of health status, usually having three to five categories. The measure is often collapsed into a dichotomous variable of good versus less than good health. This categorization has not yet been justified. METHODS: Using data from the 1958 British birth cohort, we examined the relationship between socioeconomic conditions, indicated by occupational class at four ages, and self-rated health. Results obtained for a dichotomous variable using logistic regression were compared with alternative methods for ordered categorical variables including polytomous regression, cumulative odds, continuation ratio and adjacent categories models. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Findings concerning the relationship between socioeconomic position and self-rated health yielded by a logistic regression model were confirmed by alternative statistical methods which incorporate the ordered nature of self-rated health. Similarity of results was found regarding size and significance of main effects, type of association and interactive effects.
OBJECTIVE: To assess whether equity is achieved in use of general practitioner, outpatient, and inpatient services by children and young people according to their ethnic group and socioeconomic background. DESIGN: Secondary analysis of the British general household survey, 1991-94. SUBJECTS: 20 473 children and young people aged between 0 and 19 years. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Consultations with a general practitioner within a two week period, outpatient attendances within a three month period, and inpatient stays during the past year. RESULTS: There were no significant class differences in the use of health services by children and young people, and there was little evidence of variation in use of health services according to housing tenure and parental work status. South Asian children and young people used general practitioner services more than any other ethnic group after controlling for socioeconomic background and perceived health status, but the use of hospital outpatient and inpatient services was significantly lower for children and young people from all minority ethnic groups compared with the white population. CONCLUSIONS: Our results differ from previous studies, which have reported significant class differences in use of health services for other age groups. We found no evidence that children and young people's use of health services varied according to their socioeconomic status, suggesting that equity has been achieved. A child or young person's ethnic origin, however, was clearly associated with use of general practitioner and hospital services, which could imply that children and young people from minority ethnic groups receive a poorer quality of health care than other children and young people.
The independent impacts of severe intraventricular hemorrhage, other common medical complications of prematurity, and socioeconomic status on the development in the second year of life of 32 low birth weight subjects were explored. Outcome measures included standard tests of mental and motor development, an evaluation of language competence, and an assessment of information processing ability in a habituation/recovery paradigm. Partial correlations indicated that intraventricular hemorrhage influences cognitive and motor development independently of the other predictor variables. Socioeconomic status predicted language ability and recovery of attention to a novel stimulus independent of the other predictors. Medical complications other than intraventricular hemorrhage also made an independent contribution to the variance in language outcome. Implications of these findings are discussed.