People often sleep deprive themselves voluntarily for social and lifestyle reasons. Animals also appear to stay awake longer as a result of their natural curiosity to explore novel environments and interact socially with conspecifics. Although multiple arousal systems in the brain are known to act jointly to promote and maintain wakefulness, it remains unclear whether these systems are similarl...

The Rawlsian perspective on social policy pays particular attention to the least advantaged members of society, but how should “the least advantaged” be identified? The concept of deprivation dominance operationalizes in part the Rawlsian evaluation of the welfare of the least advantaged members of society, but a statistical procedure for testing deprivation dominance is needed. In this paper, ...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the independent association between individual and area based measures of socioeconomic status and cigarette smoking habit. DESIGN AND SETTING Cross sectional, population based study. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS 12 579 men and 15 132 women aged 39-79 years living in the general community participating in the EPIC-Norfolk Study in 1993-1997. The association between soc...

BACKGROUND Injury is second only to cardiovascular disease in terms of acute care costs in North America. One key to improving injury care efficiency is to generate knowledge on the determinants of resource use. Socio-economic status (SES) is a documented risk factor for injury severity and mortality but its impact on length of stay (LOS) for injury admissions is unknown. This study aimed to ex...

BACKGROUND In England, although some studies report better health among rural populations, few have examined social inequalities in health within rural areas and how they compare to inequalities observed in urban settings. The objectives of this study are to examine (i) whether living in rural, in more affluent and in more socially cohesive areas is associated with better mental health; and (ii...

BACKGROUND Relative deprivation has previously been discussed as a possible mechanism underlying the income-health relation. The idea is that income matters to the individual's health, over and above the increased command over resources, as the basis of social comparisons between a person and his or her reference group. The following study aimed to analyze the role of individual-level relative ...

BACKGROUND Prospective data from over 10 years of follow-up were used to examine neighbourhood deprivation, social fragmentation and trajectories of health. METHODS From the third phase (1991-93) of the Whitehall II study of British civil servants, SF-36 health functioning was measured on up to five occasions for 7834 participants living in 2046 census wards. Multilevel linear regression mode...

BACKGROUND Heat and air pollution are both associated with increases in mortality. However, the interactive effect of temperature and air pollution on mortality remains unsettled. Similarly, the relationship between air pollution, air temperature, and social deprivation has never been explored. METHODS We used daily mortality data from 2004 to 2009, daily mean temperature variables and relati...

OBJECTIVES To: (1) determine the percentage of the population in England that have access to a community pharmacy within 20 min walk; (2) explore any relationship between the walking distance and urbanity; (3) explore any relationship between the walking distance and social deprivation; and (4) explore any interactions between urbanity, social deprivation and community pharmacy access. DESIGN...

BACKGROUND This paper describes the relationship between social deprivation and incidence of, and survival from, breast, lung, and colorectal cancers among residents of the South Thames regions. We analysed 23,505 cases of breast cancer, 29,903 cases of lung cancer and 21,905 cases of colorectal cancer, aged 40-99 inclusive at diagnosis and diagnosed between 1 January 1987 and 31 December 1992....