A new perspective article in the New England Journal of Medicine explains the importance of sub-populations in public health. The article points out how it can be challenging to summarize all of the nation’s public health needs and health status on the United States population level. And that to improve population health by focusing on subpopulations, obtaining relevant data to the sub-population’s health status helps generate clear goals to improve public health as a whole. For example, decreased mortality is an appropriate measure of success in oncology but not in pediatrics in the United States, where the mortality of children is low. Different measurements to summarize children’s health, such as disease-specific incidence of childhood diseases such as asthma, provide a better assessment, for example. The article also explains how improvements in children’s health are vital to the success of overall public health initiatives as healthy children are more likely to become healthy adults.

Reference:

Fuentes-Afflick E. Applying a Subpopulation Lens to Population Health. N Engl J Med. 2021 Nov 4;385(19):1729-1732. doi: 10.1056/NEJMp2113023. Epub 2021 Oct 30. PMID: 34714610.