Making sense of how social factors shape children's health
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Children who grow up in different environments tend to have distinct physical health, mental health and cognitive outcomes, according to a new study in JAMA Pediatrics.
Why it matters: The study offers a comprehensive view of how dozens of social determinants of health interact with one another and affect a child's development — and also could serve as a guide for policymakers to better target policies to address glaring health disparities.
The big picture: Researchers generally tend to look at the relationship between specific socioeconomic or environmental factors and health outcomes, but this study analyzed the cumulative effect of 84 different variables on 9- and 10-year-olds.
- It found that American children can be sorted into four different groups. Each group has distinct health and cognitive outcomes, and there are significant disparities among the groups.
- The group characterized by socioeconomic deprivation, which disproportionately includes Black and Latino children, rated the worst on a range of factors like income disparity, home values and health insurance rates. This group had the worst outcomes, "including more mental health issues, suicidal behaviors, lower cognitive performance, and poor physical health," the study concludes.
- The most affluent group — in which white children were overrepresented — generally had the best outcomes, including "fewer mental health issues, fewer suicide attempts, higher cognitive scores, and better physical health."
The bottom line: "If we can do precision medicines in the hospital, why can't we do precision policymaking?" said Yunyu Xiao, an author of the study and an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College.
- "The optimistic part is that we do have solutions. We're not just doing this study to say that children living in [a certain] type of environment is devastating and it is bad," she added. "It's really the opposite — it's encouraging policymakers to use our SDOH findings to guide them."
