Toward Increasing Our Understanding of The Link Between Income and Health Disparities

Principal Investigator: Barbara Wolfe

There is clear evidence of a link between health and income such that persons with higher incomes have better health. This has been documented for measures as diverse as mortality, self rated health, children’s health and obesity. What is less clear is the extent to which disparities in income cause differences in health, the extent to which differences in health cause differences in income and the underlying causal mechanisms. Tied to this is an issue of future import: will today’s large and increasing disparities in income and wealth lead to even larger differences in health in future generations? One approach is to use the natural experiment of gambling compacts to study the role of increases in income on the health, health care utilization and health related behaviors of American Indians. A second is to use newly available data on brain scans of healthy children collected at three points in time to attempt to disentangle the influence of income (poverty), and stressful events on anatomical dimensions of brain development and performance on a variety of age appropriate standardized test of cognitive and learning abilities.