Abstract
ABSTRACTThis study describes the frequency and types of articles on social inequalities in health published in 50 years of the Revista de Saúde Pública, taking as reference some milestones that were used as guidelines to develop the research on this theme. Checking titles, keywords and abstracts or full texts, we identified 288 articles whose central or secondary focus was social inequalities in health. Corresponding to just 1.8% in the initial years, articles on social inequalities in health have represent 10.1% of the articles published in the last decade. The designs used were mainly cross-sectional (58.0%) and ecological (18.1%). The most analyzed themes were: food/nutrition (20.8%), mortality (13.5%), infectious diseases (10.1%), oral health (9.0%), and health services (8.7%). Articles focused on the analysis of racial inequalities in health amounted to 6.9%. Few articles monitored the trends of social inequalities in health, essential enterprise to assess and support interventions, and an even smaller number evaluated the impact of policies and programs on the reduction of social inequalities in health.
Highlights
Observations on the influence of living conditions in the health of populations have been recorded since antiquity, but it is in the 19th century that data on this issue gain consistency and increase with the social medicine movement and the work of the social reformers[28]
From global approaches, which prevailed in the middle of the 19th century with the aim of understanding the causes of diseases and epidemics, the emergence of the bacteriological era led the focus of research to the identification of pathogens and to the ways of prevention and control
The issue of social inequalities in health (SIH) gained relevance in the course of the 20th century, by finding deep inequalities in living conditions and by the consistent results of researches that measured the social disparities in patterns of health-disease and access to health services[35]
Summary
Observations on the influence of living conditions in the health of populations have been recorded since antiquity, but it is in the 19th century that data on this issue gain consistency and increase with the social medicine movement and the work of the social reformers[28]. The Declaration of Alma Ata, in 1978, already highlighted the importance of interventions to promote greater equity in the access to health services, emphasizing, in this perspective, the role of social and health policies. Another milestone, within the theme of SIH, is the wide impact of the findings and controversies generated by the report of the Working Group on Inequalities in Health coordinated by Sir Douglas Black, in England, in 198035. The Latin American production in this period, fueled by historical
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