IJE Advance Access originally published online on March 22, 2006
International Journal of Epidemiology 2006 35(2):466-467; doi:10.1093/ije/dyl040
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2006; all rights reserved.
Commentary |
Commentary: Childhood education and disparities in adult health—the need for improved theories and better data
Department of Mental Health, Institute of Applied Health Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Forresterhill, Aberdeen, AB25 2ZH, UK.
E-mail: l.j.whalley@abdn.ac.uk
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Contemporary theories of social inequalities in health seek to elucidate the core principles determining disease distributions and individual susceptibilities to specific disorders. An extensive literature supports the roles of specific insults and buffers, each derived from careful observational studies, many of which reliably identify associations at a population level between specific factors and disease incidence. Amongst these factors, many acting and interacting in complex ways at multiple levels, the role of childhood education (gauged by duration or attainment) is consistently shown to be a major and pervasive influence on health inequalities.1 The influence of education, in some studies, acts independently of socioeconomic status and initial intelligence.2,3 Thus, there seems to be some aspect of education that uniquely captures individual differences not detected by other means. The predictive power of ‘education’ is a key fact