ShareThisAcross the country, adults with less education are more than twice as likely than college graduates to consider themselves healthy, according to a new study released Wednesday.
The report, done for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America, found that greater educational achievement equaled better health status, regardless of race or ethnic background, both nationwide and within every state and the District of Columbia.
"We've found a sliding scale of health that is clearly tied to the years of education a person has achieved,'' said Dr. Sue Egerter, co-author of the study and co-director of the University of California-San Francisco Center on Social Disparities in Health.
The study is the first to confirm the impact on health of education in each state, and ranks the states based on the difference between the health status reported by all adults and that reported by college graduates. Researchers have found that self-reported health status in surveys generally closely tracks actual medical assessments by doctors.
For instance, California was found to have the biggest "health gap," with 48 percent of all adults ages 25 to 74 indicating on a federal health survey that they were not in excellent or very good health, compared with only 28 percent of college graduates.
People with less than a high-school diploma were particularly likely to see their health as less than robust. In Mississippi, for instance, almost 74 percent of those who did not graduate from high school reported health that was less than optimal, compared with 37 percent of college grads.
Nationally, 45 percent of adults said their health was "less than very good" (on a scale that starts at "excellent" through "very good" and bottoms out with "poor"), while just under 30 percent of college grads rated their health as "less than very good."
"Regardless of where your state falls in these rankings, the news isn't good,'' said Mark McClellan, co-chairman of the commission and a former Medicare administrator.
"One of the most important things we can do for our nation's health is to improve education quality and educational attainment."
For more information online: www.commissiononhealth.org/statedata.
(Contact Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
