OBJECTIVES India bears a significant portion of the global tobacco burden with high prevalence of tobacco use. This study examines the socioeconomic patterning of tobacco use and identifies the changing gender and socioeconomic dynamics in light of the Cigarette Epidemic Model. DESIGN Secondary analyses of second and third National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS ...

INTRODUCTION Recent research on health inequalities moves beyond illustrating the importance of psychosocial factors for health to a more in-depth study of the specific psychosocial pathways involved. Social capital is a concept that captures both a buffer function of the social environment on health, as well as potential negative effects arising from social inequality and exclusion. This syste...

BACKGROUND Although social environments may influence alcohol-related behaviours in youth, the relationship between neighbourhood socioeconomic context and effectiveness of school-based prevention against underage drinking has been insufficiently investigated. We study whether the social environment affects the impact of a new school-based prevention programme on alcohol use among European stud...

The socioeconomic and environmental features of local places (community context) influence the relationship between humans and their physical environment. In times of environmental disturbance, this community context is expected to influence human perceptual and behavioral responses. Residents from nine Colorado communities experiencing a large outbreak of mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus po...

Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes. Telomeres get shorter each time a cell divides, and critically shortened telomeres trigger cellular senescence. Thus, telomere length is hypothesized to be a biological marker of aging. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between neighborhood characteristics and leukocyte telomere length. Using data fr...

Preschools may reduce inequalities in early academic achievement by providing children from disadvantaged families with higher-quality learning environments than they would otherwise receive. In this study, longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of more than 600 twin pairs were used to estimate the contributions of genes, the shared environment, and the nonshared environment ...

BACKGROUND Children with a low socioeconomic position are more affected by mental difficulties as compared to children with a higher socioeconomic position. This paper explores whether this socioeconomic pattern persists in the prosperous German city of Munich which features high quality of life and coverage of children mental health specialists that lies well above the national average and is ...

Education, socioeconomic status, and intelligence are commonly used as predictors of health outcomes, social environment, and mortality. Education and socioeconomic status are typically viewed as environmental variables although both correlate with intelligence, which has a substantial genetic basis. Using data from 6815 unrelated subjects from the Generation Scotland study, we examined the gen...

STUDY OBJECTIVE The objective in this follow up study from the Malmö myocardial infarction register has been to assess whether long term survival following discharge after first myocardial infarction has any relation with the socioeconomic environment and to assess to what extent intra-urban differences in mortality from ischaemic heart disease can be accounted for by covariance with long term ...