Hui Zheng, assistant professor of sociology, is lead author of a study revealing levels of health disparity have increased substantially for people born in the United States after 1980. The study also found that health disparity tends to increase as people move into middle age, before declining as people reach old age.

These two results suggest that the gap between the healthiest and least healthy people in the United States as a whole will grow larger for the next one or even two decades as the younger generations grow older and replace previous generations.

"If that trend continues, as I expect it will, health disparities in the whole population will increase in the coming decades," Zheng said.

Zheng conducted the study with Yang Yang of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Kenneth Land of Duke University. Their results appear in the December issue of the journal American Sociological Review.

Read the press release, courtesy of Jeff Grabmeier, office of research communications. http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/healthdisp.htm