Subject Area
Section 5: We live in a society
Abstract
The social determinants of health, as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), are “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, and people’s access to power, money and resources.” Epidemiologists have long studied the nexus between social forces and disease and have widely agreed that such forces are directly causal of pathologies. This paper is an analytic review of the existing literature on several social determinants— namely socioeconomic status (SES), race and ethnicity, age, working and living conditions, and social integration— and how they pertain to the causation, progression, and treatment of cancer.
