According to a study carried out in 15 European cities –among them, Madrid and Barcelona–, the socioeconomic is key in the development of diseases with a higher risk of mortality. Researchers have detected great inequalities between different countries and urban centers in most causes of death and believe that the greater the poverty, the more mortality.
Although socioeconomic inequalities are increasingly considered a public health problem, they were hardly associated with mortality factors in urban areas of Europe and the subject had been little studied by science. But a new study has analyzed these differences between 2000 and 2008 according to the main diseases in areas of 15 European cities (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bratislava, Brussels, Budapest, Helsinki, Kosice, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Prague, Rotterdam, Stockholm , Turin and Zurich).
The authors, a team of researchers from the 12 participating countries, examined nine specific causes of mortality in relation to the number of deaths and an index of socioeconomic deprivation. The diseases included were ischemic heart and cerebrovascular, lung cancer, prostate (in men) and breast (in women). Cases of influenza and pneumonia, chronic liver disease and diabetes were also taken into account, as a paradigm of endocrine, nutritional and metabolic disease.
While in men a direct relationship between poverty and mortality was observed – the greater the deprivation, the greater the mortality – in most cities and the causes analyzed, in women , the diseases most related to a low economic level were diabetes , ischemic heart disease, chronic liver diseases and respiratory diseases.
On the other hand, certain diseases appeared more in certain areas. For example, lung cancer mortality was associated with poverty in northern European cities and in Kosice (Slovakia), but this relationship did not occur in southern cities. Breast cancer risk was inversely associated with deprivation (that is, the higher the poverty the lower the mortality) in three southern European cities, such as Lisbon, Barcelona and Madrid.
