Visualizing Health Determinants in a Global Context - eScholarship

In this work, our objective is to visualize the relationship between the variables that impact health in a global context. Recently, Cornia et al. [1] have proposed five main determinants of global health – material deprivation, progress in health technology, acute psychosocial stress, unhealthy lifestyle, and income inequality etc. Results of regression analysis worldwide indicate that almost 90% of the variation in health can be attributed to twelve variables representing these five determinants. We compute correlations between the health variables and its determinants and apply a visualization tool [2] to display these correlations globally and at country level in order to gain a better understanding. We observe that the country-level results obtained through easy-to-understand graphs and simple correlation analysis pose an anomaly to the worldwide regression results and require further analysis to close the gap between correlation and regression analysis and the gap between the country-level and global-level analysis.