Income inequality and social gradients in children’s height: a comparison of cohort studies from five high-income countries

Philippa K Bird · Kate E. Pickett · Hilary M. Graham · Tomas Faresjö · Vincent W. V. Jaddoe · Johnny Ludvigsson +4 more

18 citations0/0 files storedBMJ Paediatrics Open

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Health disparities and outcomes Income, Poverty, and Inequality Child and Adolescent Health

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Health and well-being are better, on average, in countries that are more equal, but less is known about how this benefit is distributed across society. Height is a widely used, objective indicator of child health and predictor of lifelong well-being. We compared the level and slope of social gradients in children's height in high-income countries with different levels of income inequality, in order to investigate whether children growing up in all socioeconomic circumstances are healthier in more equal countries. METHODS: We conducted a coordinated analysis of data from five cohort studies from countries selected to represent different levels of income inequality (the USA, UK, Australia, the Netherlands and Sweden). We used standardised methods to compare social gradients in children's height at age 4-6 years, by parent education status and household income. We used linear regression models and predicted height for children with the same age, sex and socioeconomic circumstances in each cohort. RESULTS: The total analytic sample was 37 063 children aged 4-6 years. Gradients by parent education and household income varied between cohorts and outcomes. After adjusting for differences in age and sex, children in more equal countries (Sweden, the Netherlands) were taller at all levels of parent education and household income than children in less equal countries (USA, UK and Australia), with the greatest between-country differences among children with less educated parents and lowest household incomes. CONCLUSIONS: The study provides preliminary evidence that children across society do better in more equal countries, with greatest benefit among children from the most disadvantaged socioeconomic groups.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

References

2008Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health 2010The spirit level : why equality is better for everyone 2005Indicators of socioeconomic position (part 1): Figure 1 2014Income inequality and health: A causal review 2010Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health. Final report of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health 2005Income inequality and population health: A review and explanation of the evidence 2000Income inequality and mortality: importance to health of individual income, psychosocial environment, or material conditions 1995Stature and the Standard of Living

Cited by

2025Income in epidemiological research: a guide to measurement and analytical treatment with a case study on mental disorders and mortality

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.