Relationship between socioeconomic factors and mortality rates in the population

Abstract

Based on the materials of a review of the Russian and foreign literature, which have been obtained via searches in the Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and Elibrary databases, the authors provide data on the results of international and Russian works evaluating the influence of socioeconomic factors on mortality rates. The latter are demonstrated to be affected by a lot of socioeconomic factors, among them the prevailing ones are poverty, social stress, no social support, and low social integration, as evidenced by many studies. At the same time, the influence of socioeconomic factors are closely correlated with others that have a substantial impact on health and, therefore, life expectancy, such as lifestyle, medical care quality and availability, and other factors that are still difficult to detect by statistics, such as poor socioeconomic conditions in childhood. A number of studies also show that people with a low education level develop a larger number of cardiovascular events regardless of other socioeconomic factors; and cardiovascular mortality correlates inversely with educational level in all countries. Multiple studies have proven that the larger number the vulnerable groups are in a district, region, country, the worse public health indicators and the higher mortality rate. The vulnerable groups (in terms of the relationship between poverty, ill health, and premature mortality) include alcohol abusers, drug addicts, the homeless, the unemployed, children (orphans in particular), migrants, the elderly, and persons with congenital malformations.