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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Haomiao Jia, PhD, Department of Community Health and Social Medicine, City University of New York, 138th Street and Convent Avenue, Room A109, New York, NY 10031, (212) 650-7786, jia@scisun.sci.ccny.cuny.edu
The CDC developed a set of four survey measures for Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQOL) and has used them in the Behavioral Risk Surveillance System (BRFSS) since 1993. The HRQOL is a broad concept of health status that includes both physical and mental health. Besides providing a supplement measure of individual’s disability and chronic conditions, HRQOL is useful in identifying population health disparities and tracking trends. The BRFSS is a nationwide state-based sampling survey. This study uses year 2000 BRFSS data to examine geographic disparities of population HRQOL and to identify local-level factors that influence the population’s health perception and health status. We calculated age-adjusted HRQOL scores by state and region. West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Texas, and Mississippi had the worst HRQOL scores while Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Minnesota had the best scores. We then examined the relationship between some of county-level demographic and socioeconomic variables and individuals’ HRQOL scores based on multilevel analyses. We found, after adjust for respondents’ age, race, and gender, counties with higher proportion residents being in poverty, being social security benefit recipients, having supplemental security income, not finishing high school, being foreign born, etc., were associated with bad HRQOL score. Finally, we validated HRQOL measures by comparing estimated county HRQOL scores to a number of traditional health statistics such as mortality, life expectancy, infant death rate, and hospital admission rates. These statistics were all strongly associated with HRQOL scores.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Quality of Life, Data/Surveillance
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.