BACKGROUND China's rapidly changing economic landscape has led to widening social inequalities. Occupational status in terms of occupational type and prestige may reflect these socio-structural shifts of social position and be more predictive of self-rated health status than income and education, which may only reflect more gradual acquisitions of social status over time. The goals of this stud...

There have been recent efforts to use social media to estimate demographic characteristics, such as age, gender or income, but there has been little work on investigating the effect of data acquisition methods on producing these estimates. In this paper, we compare four different Twitter data acquisition methods and explore their effects on the prediction of one particular demographic character...

BACKGROUND The prevalence of obesity is increasing rapidly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) as their populations become exposed to obesogenic environments. The transition from an agrarian to an industrial and service-based economy results in important lifestyle changes. Yet different socioeconomic groups may experience and respond to these changes differently. Investigating the socio...

Background and purpose - Assessment of potential disparities in access to care is a vital part of achieving equity in health and healthcare. We have therefore studied the effect of socioeconomic status (SES) on the rates of knee and hip replacement due to osteoarthritis. Methods - This was a cohort study in Skåne, Sweden. We included all residents aged ≥ 35 years with consultations between 2004...

Recent studies have suggested that some disadvantaged socio-demographic groups face serious environmental-related inequities in Hong Kong due to the rising ambient urban temperatures. Identifying heat-vulnerable groups and locating areas of Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) inequities is thus important for prioritizing interventions to mitigate death/illness rates from heat. This study addresses...

OBJECTIVE The study aims to evaluate the predictors of non-prescription medicine purchasing patterns among pharmacy patrons in Malaysia. METHODS A cross-sectional nationwide study was undertaken in 2011 in sixty randomly selected community pharmacies across 14 Malaysian states. A pharmacy exit survey was conducted over a 6-month period across Malaysia. A one-stage random cluster sampling tech...

PURPOSE This study was conducted to determine the level of satisfaction of patients utilizing first-level health care facilities as a function of health system performance rating in Elazig province of Turkey. METHODS The study was conducted between December 2013 and March 2014 at the family health centers in the Elazig province center. For collecting the data in the cross-sectional study cond...