OBJECTIVE To determine the relationship between hospital admissions for falls and hip fracture in elderly people and area characteristics such as socio-economic deprivation. STUDY DESIGN Ecological study of routinely collected hospital admissions data for falls and hip fracture in people aged 75 years or over for 1992-1997, linked at electoral ward level with characteristics from census data....

AIMS To investigate infant deaths in Cumbria, 1950-93, in relation to individual and community level socioeconomic status. METHODS Retrospective birth cohort study of all 283,668 live births and 4889 infant deaths in Cumbria, 1950-93. Community deprivation (Townsend score) and individual social class were used to estimate socioeconomic status. Logistic regression was used to investigate risk ...

Study objective: To investigate whether the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2000 (IMD) is more strongly related to inequalities in health in rural areas than traditional deprivation indices. To explore the contribution of the IMD domain ‘‘geographical access to services’’ to understanding rural health variations. Design: A geographically based cross sectional study. Setting: Nine counties in the ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To investigate whether the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2000 (IMD) is more strongly related to inequalities in health in rural areas than traditional deprivation indices. To explore the contribution of the IMD domain "geographical access to services" to understanding rural health variations. DESIGN A geographically based cross sectional study. SETTING Nine counties in the s...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Measuring socio-economic deprivation is a major challenge usually addressed through the use of composite indices. This paper aims to clarify the technical details regarding composite index construction. The distribution of some variables, for example unemployment, varies over time, and these variations must be considered when composite indices are periodically re-evaluated. The...

OBJECTIVE To describe the variation in the incidence of colorectal cancer across Northern Ireland and relate it to factors associated with community deprivation. DESIGN This was a cross sectional descriptive study. SETTING Incidence data were obtained from a population based register for the period 1990-91. Small areas were characterised by their "affluence", or lack of it, by deriving a To...

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...

OBJECTIVES To examine the relation between social deprivation and the prevalence of epilepsy and associated morbidity using hospital activity data as a proxy. METHODS The study was conducted in the health district of South Glamorgan, United Kingdom (population 434 000). Routinely available hospital data (inpatient and outpatient), an epilepsy clinic database, and mortality data underwent a pr...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the association between material deprivation and injury sustained in violence by adolescents aged 11-17 years. METHODS Computerised data relating to gender, attendance date and resident postcode of all patients aged 11-17 years who received treatment for violence-related injuries at seven emergency departments (ED) in South Wales over 12 months, 1 October 2005 to 30 S...

The reasons for the higher levels of excess winter mortality in Britain, compared with countries with colder winters, are unclear. Ecological studies suggest that both increased outdoor and indoor cold exposure relating to poor housing energy efficiency and lack of adequate clothing and physical activity when outdoors are important. 2 It seems plausible that excess winter mortality would be gre...