Reduce Income Inequalities to Save Millions of Lives and Improve Quality of Life

In that a widening of inequalities has taken place since the 1970s, Naoki Kondo, from University of Yamanashi (Japan), and colleagues from Japan and the United States studied data on nearly 60 million residents of 30 countries, finding that those who live in areas with a large income inequality gap are more likely to die at a younger age, regardless of their income, socioeconomic status, age and gender. States the team: “The results suggest a modest adverse effect of income inequality on health.  The results also support the … existence of a threshold of income inequality beyond which adverse impacts on health begin to emerge.”