Social inequalities in health. The case of Diabetes Mellitus: cross sectional study among the Galician population

Abstract

The relationship between social circumstances and health is widely assumed by the scientific community. It can be said that inequality is cause and effect of the disease. This work adds to the epidemiological work on Diabetes Mellitus (DM), but in this case, it emphasizes the influence of social factors. The objective is to illustrate how diabetes mellitus impacts on the population, according to their socioeconomic conditions. First, this paper reviews most recent theories supporting the association between social factors and disease. Also, to achieve the purposed goals, an exhaustive exploitation of secondary data has been carried out. Data were mainly gathered from the National Health Survey, carried out by the Statistics National Institute on a sample of 37.500 individuals, in Spain, in year 2017. Besides, an ad hoc survey among the diabetic population was carried out in the Galician region, at the northwestern Spain, Sample size was fixed, in this case, on 512 diabetics. From these collected data, statistical tests were performed, such as contingency tables and other association tests, to check the relationship between the dependent variable prevalence of diabetes and explicatory variables social class, family income and educational level. Among the results, we can indicate an inverse relationship between social class and the prevalence of diabetes, which is higher among people with fewer resources and, especially, with a lower educational level.