During the whole project, we have made considerable contributions to the field of health inequalities. To begin with, we have already completed and published the “foundational” or background paper lying down some of the key concepts to be analyzed during the project. They are included in the paper “On the measurement of healthy lifespan inequality”, which has been published in Population Health Metrics.
The project involves the exploitation of longitudinal and cross-sectional data. As regards the analysis of longitudinal data, we are currently in the middle of the process of requesting and accessing the health records for the populations of Catalonia and Denmark. Regarding the Catalan health registers, we have already framed the cohorts that will be analyzed and the diseases that will be studied, and in the next couple of months we should be able to start with the first longitudinal analyses. As regards the access to the Danish health registers, we have already signed a collaboration agreement between the Center for Demographic Studies and the University of Southern Denmark (who will provide access to the registers).
An important part of the project involves the exploitation of cross-sectional data to generate our new population health indicators. In this regard, we have already completed our analyses in several studies. One of them involves the study of health inequalities in contemporary Spain across education groups and subnational regions, which has already been published in the journal Population, Space and Place. Another one studies health inequalities in thirty European countries both in 2005 and 2015, which we have recently completed and has been published in Demography (the flagship journal of the Population Association of America). In addition, we have completed another paper estimating our new population health indicators at a global scale taking advantage of the “Global Burden of Disease (GBD)” database. With such database, we have been able to extend our estimates for more than 200 countries and territories all over the world, since 1990 to the present date, for women and men separately. The paper has been published in the European Journal of Epidemiology (a journal with one of the highest impact factors in the field).
Another strand of research we have been working on in the project is the study of cause-of-death diversity and disease heterogeneity in contemporary societies. We have already completed two papers. One of them investigates the measurement of cause-of-death diversity in those settings where individuals can die from several causes of death simultaneously. It has already been accepted in Demography, the top journal in the field. Another one takes advantage of the GBD database, and investigates the levels, trends and determinants of cause-of-death diversity from a global perspective (including 204 countries and territories from 1990 to 2019). It has been published in BMC Public Health.
During the whole project, our results have been presented at several international conferences (like the ones organized by the “European Association for Population Studies” (EAPS), the “Population Association of America” (PAA), the “International Union for the Scientific Study of Population” (IUSSP) or the “International network on health expectancies and the disablement process” (REVES)) and workshops (e.g. the ones organized by the “EAPS Health, Morbidity and Mortality Working Group”, the “New Perspectives on Lifespan Inequality” organized by the Universities of Oxford, Southern Denmark and Tel Aviv, or the “Climbing Mortality Models” seminar organized by the Universities of Bocconi and Padova). To conclude the project, we celebrated a closing day-and-a-half workshop at the CED with 25 international researchers
The results of our research have been published in top journals, like PNAS, Population and Development Review, European Journal of Epidemiology, International Journal of Epidemiology, Population Health Metrics, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, or Demography. Several other papers are currently under review and/or in different stages of the publication process.
Beyond academia, the results generated by the project have caught the attention of the Health Ministry of the Catalan Government. Taking advantage of the health and mortality registers from Catalonia, we have monitored the patterns of morbidity onset across cohorts and its relationship with mortality. These results will be extremely useful for the design of the next Health Plan for Catalonia for the coming years, an important collaboration that bears direct relationship with the outputs of the project.
