Improving Education and other Social Conditions Would Save More Lives Than Advances in Medicine: VCU Study

By Anne Buckley

While medical advances prevented approximately 175,000 deaths in the United States between 1996 and 2002, eight times as many lives could have been saved by eliminating the higher death rates experienced by Americans with inadequate education, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher says in a study published today.

According to Steven H. Woolf, M.D., M.P.H., professor in VCU's Department of Family Medicine and a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, if the death rate for college-educated adults applied to everyone, 1.4 million lives would have been saved during those years.

In a study published in the April issue of the American Journal of Public Health, available online today, Woolf and his colleagues write that social change could trump medical advances in saving lives, because social conditions hold great influence over health status. People with inadequate education have higher death rates than those with a college education, Woolf said.

Higher death rates among people with lower education levels are linked to many factors, including lower incomes, inferior access to health care and unhealthy communities.

"On the basis of how many lives can be saved, our data suggest that efforts to correct the social conditions causing education-associated excess mortality should be proportionately greater than society's investment in medical advances," Woolf said. "Today's leaders embrace opposite priorities, however.

"Indeed, budget pressures from escalating health care costs and medical research have led the government to reduce support for social services, including education, thereby choking off an upstream strategy that could reduce the demand for health care," he said.