Online Program

286118
Concentrated disadvantage and mortality rates in chicago's 77 community areas


Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Bijou Hunt, MA, Sinai Urban Health Institute, Sinai Health System, Chicago, IL
Steven Whitman, PhD, Sinai Urban Health Institute, Sinai Health System, Chicago, IL
Concentrated disadvantage has emerged in the field of public health as a measure of neighborhood effects, capturing the notions that: social inequality exists between neighborhoods, especially in terms of race and SES; health problems tend to cluster in geographically defined units and are predicted by neighborhood characteristics; the relationship between community context and health outcomes persists even when individual-level risk factors are controlled. In order to examine the relationship between concentrated disadvantage and cause-specific mortality, we calculated 3-year average (2005-2007) age-adjusted mortality rates for Chicago and by Chicago community area (CA, n=77). Mortality rates per 100,000 population were calculated for several causes of death, revealing extensive variation across the city's CAs: heart disease (range: 141-372), cancer (110-295), stroke (23-104), and diabetes (7-68). We also performed a principal component analysis on six variables often used to create a measure of concentrated disadvantage: welfare receipt, poverty, unemployment, female-headed households, racial composition, and density of children. These indicators all loaded on a single principal component, concentrated disadvantage, which explains 76% of the variance across these items (Eigenvalue=4.6; next largest<0.75). The variables were thus summed to produce the concentrated disadvantage scores for each CA. The mortality rate for each cause of death was positively and statistically significantly correlated (r<0.64, p<0.0001) with the concentrated disadvantage scores. Data for each cause of death will be presented by CA in map form. We will also present the correlations between the concentrated disadvantage scores and the cause-specific mortality rates.

Learning Areas:

Epidemiology

Learning Objectives:
Compare age-adjusted mortality rates for diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancer across the 77 community areas of Chicago Demonstrate the relationship between the concentrated disadvantage index and mortality rates

Keyword(s): Health Disparities, Mortality

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have worked extensively with vital records data and am familiar with analyzing such data at the level of the community area. I also have experience working with census data and compiling census tract-level data to the level of the community area.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.