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Educational inequalities in hypertension: complex patterns in intersections with gender and race in Brazil

BACKGROUND: Hypertension is a major public health issue worldwide, but knowledge is scarce about its patterns and its relationship to multiple axes of social disadvantages in Latin American countries. This study describes the educational inequality in the prevalence of hypertension in Brazil, includ...

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Autores principales: Alves, Ronaldo Fernandes Santos, Faerstein, Eduardo
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5112659/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27852274
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12939-016-0441-6
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author Alves, Ronaldo Fernandes Santos
Faerstein, Eduardo
author_facet Alves, Ronaldo Fernandes Santos
Faerstein, Eduardo
author_sort Alves, Ronaldo Fernandes Santos
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Hypertension is a major public health issue worldwide, but knowledge is scarce about its patterns and its relationship to multiple axes of social disadvantages in Latin American countries. This study describes the educational inequality in the prevalence of hypertension in Brazil, including a joint stratification by gender and race. METHODS: We analyzed interview-based data and blood pressure measurements from 59,402 participants aged 18 years or older at the 2013 Brazilian National Health Survey (PNS). Sociodemographic characteristics analyzed were gender (male, female), racial self-identification (white, brown, black), age (5-years intervals), and educational attainment (pre-primary, primary, secondary, tertiary). Hypertension was defined as systolic blood pressure ≥ 140 mmHg and/or diastolic blood pressure ≥ 90 mmHg, and/or self-reported use of antihypertensive medications in the last 2 weeks. We used logistic regression to evaluate the age-adjusted prevalences of hypertension (via marginal modeling), and pair-wise associations between education level and odds of hypertension. Further, the educational inequality in hypertension was summarized through the Relative Index of Inequality (RII) and the Slope Index of Inequality (SII). All analyses considered the appropriate sampling weights and intersections with gender, race, and education. RESULTS: Age-adjusted prevalence of hypertension was 34.0 % and 30.8 % among men and women, respectively. Black and brown women had a higher prevalence than whites (34.5 % vs. 31.8 % vs. 29.5 %), whereas no racial differences were observed among men. White and brown, but not black women, showed graded inverse associations between hypertension and educational attainment; among men, non-statistically significant associations were observed in all racial strata. The RII and SII estimated inverse gradients among white (RII = 2.5, SII = 18.1 %) and brown women (RII = 2.3, SII = 14.5 %), and homogeneous distributions of hypertension in educational subgroups among black women and among men. CONCLUSION: In this representative sample of Brazilian adults, the association between educational attainment and hypertension was influenced by gender and race – a topic still poorly understood. Our findings highlight the importance of assessing intersections of multiple sociodemographic characteristics in health inequalities research. The use of comprehensive measures of inequality, such as RII and SII, provide useful insights for monitoring health inequalities in an intersectional perspective.
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spelling pubmed-51126592016-11-23 Educational inequalities in hypertension: complex patterns in intersections with gender and race in Brazil Alves, Ronaldo Fernandes Santos Faerstein, Eduardo Int J Equity Health Research BACKGROUND: Hypertension is a major public health issue worldwide, but knowledge is scarce about its patterns and its relationship to multiple axes of social disadvantages in Latin American countries. This study describes the educational inequality in the prevalence of hypertension in Brazil, including a joint stratification by gender and race. METHODS: We analyzed interview-based data and blood pressure measurements from 59,402 participants aged 18 years or older at the 2013 Brazilian National Health Survey (PNS). Sociodemographic characteristics analyzed were gender (male, female), racial self-identification (white, brown, black), age (5-years intervals), and educational attainment (pre-primary, primary, secondary, tertiary). Hypertension was defined as systolic blood pressure ≥ 140 mmHg and/or diastolic blood pressure ≥ 90 mmHg, and/or self-reported use of antihypertensive medications in the last 2 weeks. We used logistic regression to evaluate the age-adjusted prevalences of hypertension (via marginal modeling), and pair-wise associations between education level and odds of hypertension. Further, the educational inequality in hypertension was summarized through the Relative Index of Inequality (RII) and the Slope Index of Inequality (SII). All analyses considered the appropriate sampling weights and intersections with gender, race, and education. RESULTS: Age-adjusted prevalence of hypertension was 34.0 % and 30.8 % among men and women, respectively. Black and brown women had a higher prevalence than whites (34.5 % vs. 31.8 % vs. 29.5 %), whereas no racial differences were observed among men. White and brown, but not black women, showed graded inverse associations between hypertension and educational attainment; among men, non-statistically significant associations were observed in all racial strata. The RII and SII estimated inverse gradients among white (RII = 2.5, SII = 18.1 %) and brown women (RII = 2.3, SII = 14.5 %), and homogeneous distributions of hypertension in educational subgroups among black women and among men. CONCLUSION: In this representative sample of Brazilian adults, the association between educational attainment and hypertension was influenced by gender and race – a topic still poorly understood. Our findings highlight the importance of assessing intersections of multiple sociodemographic characteristics in health inequalities research. The use of comprehensive measures of inequality, such as RII and SII, provide useful insights for monitoring health inequalities in an intersectional perspective. BioMed Central 2016-11-17 /pmc/articles/PMC5112659/ /pubmed/27852274 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12939-016-0441-6 Text en © The Author(s). 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research
Alves, Ronaldo Fernandes Santos
Faerstein, Eduardo
Educational inequalities in hypertension: complex patterns in intersections with gender and race in Brazil
title Educational inequalities in hypertension: complex patterns in intersections with gender and race in Brazil
title_full Educational inequalities in hypertension: complex patterns in intersections with gender and race in Brazil
title_fullStr Educational inequalities in hypertension: complex patterns in intersections with gender and race in Brazil
title_full_unstemmed Educational inequalities in hypertension: complex patterns in intersections with gender and race in Brazil
title_short Educational inequalities in hypertension: complex patterns in intersections with gender and race in Brazil
title_sort educational inequalities in hypertension: complex patterns in intersections with gender and race in brazil
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5112659/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27852274
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12939-016-0441-6
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