Poverty contributes to hundreds of thousands of American deaths a year, a recent American Medical Association study finds.
"We need a whole new scientific agenda on poverty and mortality," said David Brady, a professor of public policy at the University of California Riverside, whose recent co-authored study aims to jump-start that agenda by asking just how many Americans die from poverty each year. It's well established that poverty is bad for your health. But as a public health issue, the US knows less about the direct link between poverty and death than we know about, say, the link between smoking and death. Current estimates suggest smoking kills 480,000 Americans per year. Obesity kills 280,000, and drug overdoses claimed 106,000 American lives in 2021. Together, risk factors and their mortality estimates help motivate public health campaigns and government-funded efforts to save lives. But how many Americans does poverty actually kill? The question has received little attention compared to other mortality risks, and meanwhile, poverty remains prevalent across the country. Brady — alongside sociologist Hui Zheng at Ohio State University and Ulrich Kohler, a professor of empirical social research at the University of Potsdam — published their study in April in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Their results find poverty is America's fourth-leading risk factor for death, behind only heart disease, cancer, and smoking. A single year of poverty, defined relatively in the study as having less than 50 percent of the US median household income, is associated with 183,000 American deaths per year. Being in "cumulative poverty," or 10 years or more of uninterrupted poverty, is associated with 295,000 annual deaths. Amelia Karraker, a health scientist administrator at the National Institute on Aging, explains that research has shown a variety of pathways that connect poverty and mortality. These range from neighborhood amenities and nutrition down to the impacts of stress on the body: "Being poor is really stressful, which we know from NIH-supported research has…