Clarence C. Gravlee

Last week I posted a link to new interactive maps of obesity in the United States, produced by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This week we continue the theme with the CDC’s new Social Determinants of Health Maps.

The Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention explains the rationale for the maps in terms laid out by the CDC’s Social Determinants of Health Working Group:

Social determinants of health are factors in the social environment that contribute to or detract from the health of individuals and communities. These factors include, but are not limited to the following:

• Socioeconomic status
• Transportation
• Housing
• Access to services
• Discrimination by social grouping (e.g., race, gender, or class)
• Social or environmental stressors

The 15 maps on the CDC website correspond imperfectly to this list of social influences on health. The first set of “socioenvironmental” factors includes maps of county-level data for poverty, unemployment, white collar workers, high school education, college education, and urban-rural classification. The next set of “sociodemographic” factors includes percent of population ages 65 or older and the standard bureaucratic set of racial and ethnic categories. The last set on health care focuses on health insurance and the prevalence of neurologists and physicians who specialize in cardiovascular disease.

As the CDC recognizes, this set of factors only scratches the surface of social influences on population health. But it’s useful to have access to maps that illustrate the striking spatial organization of basic factors such as poverty, race, and health care at a national scale. The maps also help to make clear that health inequalities are about much more than health care: Anyone who saw these maps next to similar maps of cardiovascular disease or any other major cause of death would quickly see that the distribution of poverty matters more for population health than does the distribution of cardiologists.

In my teaching, I have often used a series of maps produced by the CDC to illustrate how obesity rates have grown state-by-state over the last few decades. The visual display of the maps always makes a stronger impression on students than would a simple table of numbers.

CDC makes the maps available in several formats on its website, and there are a variety of other visualizations of the data on the web. The best I’ve seen is the new, web-based version of the maps produced by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF’s version draws on the same CDC data, but the maps are more interactive and visually striking—as you can see in the snapshots above, which show data for 1987 and 2007. Visit the RWJF website to see the animated version in action.

Have you seen other ways of presenting obesity data that you like better? If so, leave a comment below.

A new report from the Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) argues that policies to curb obesity in the U.S. are failing. Last year, according to the report, obesity rates increased in 37 states and decreased in none. In more than half of the states, one-quarter or more of the population is considered obese. Chronic conditions associated with obesity, including diabetes and hypertension, are also on the rise, especially in the southern U.S.

The report makes recommendations about policies to reduce obesity, with a focus on intervening in children’s nutritional environment.

Read the news release or download the full report (PDF) for more.