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For too many older people the effects of deprivation, past and present cause problems

THE IMPACT OF DEPRIVATION 

Every city and country in the world can show a difference in health status, both lifespan and healthspan, between the wealthiest and most deprived sub-groups of the population, although the gap is wider in some countries , notably in the United States, and narrower in others, notably Scandinavia. This is a dramatic map and the depressing news is that the gap is not getting narrower.

Research to understand the reason why deprivation increases mortality and decreases both lifespan and health span is more complex because so many factors are involved but some interesting work  from Scotland has suggested that people in deprived populations may have a health status which is worse than would be estimated simply by looking at the risk factors such as cigarette smoking.  One possibility is that stress is particularly high in the populations with a high level of deprivation because there are often other factors such as poor standards of housing, pollution and crime.

For these reasons it is difficult to be definite about deprivation. Nonetheless what people are clear about now is that not only is there a shorter life span there is also a shorter healthspan namely the disabling diseases, complicated by loss of fitness, which cause dependency on others  come on at any earlier stage among people from the more deprived parts of the population. Frailty for example is thought by many to come on a decade earlier among the most deprived parts of the population as opposed to the least deprived areas of the population.
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