The aim of this study was to separately analyze the association between the socioeconomic deprivation rate and all-cause mortality in men and women living in the provincial capitals of Andalusia and Catalonia.
To this end, we designed an ecological study at a small-area level using the census section as the unit of analysis. We analyzed 188,983 and 109,478 deaths recorded in the provincial capitals of Andalusia and Catalonia, respectively. We used a hierarchical Bayesian model to study the possible relationship between mortality and socioeconomic deprivation rate.
The results showed that, in most cities, the risk of death among men was higher in the most disadvantaged areas compared with the less deprived ones. No evidence of excess female mortality was found in the most disadvantaged areas in either Autonomous Region.
The study article provides an applied explanation of the methodology used to construct the “Atlas of Mortality in the Provincial Capitals of Catalonia (AMCAC Project) (Atlas de mortalidad de las capitales de provincia de Andalucía y Cataluña [Proyecto AMCAC])”. This is one of the first atlases in Spain for which a Besag-York-Mollié was used within the context of spatiotemporal modeling.