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

News releases and media advisories

For immediate release:
2/28/2007

Anne Buckley
VCU Communications and Public Relations
(804) 828-6052
albuckley@vcu.edu

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

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.

About VCU and the VCU Medical Center:

Virginia Commonwealth University is a major, urban public research university with national and international rankings in sponsored research. Located on two downtown campuses in Richmond, VCU enrolls more than 32,000 students in 205 certificate and degree programs in the arts, sciences and humanities. Sixty-five of the programs are unique in Virginia, many of them crossing the disciplines of VCU’s 15 schools and one college. MCV Hospitals and the health sciences schools of Virginia Commonwealth University compose the VCU Medical Center, one of the nation’s leading academic medical centers. For more, see www.vcu.edu.