Cluster pattern analysis of environmental stressors and quantifying their impact on all-cause mortality in Belgium.

Environmental stress represents an important burden on health and leads to a considerable number of diseases, hospitalisations, and excess mortality. Our study encompasses a representative sample size drawn from the Belgian population in 2016 (n = 11.26 million, with a focus on n = 11.

Trends in socioeconomic inequalities in cause-specific premature mortality in Belgium, 1998-2019.

Background: Higher levels of socioeconomic deprivation have been consistently associated with increased risk of premature mortality, but a detailed analysis by causes of death is lacking in Belgium. We aim to investigate the association between area deprivation and all-cause and cause-specific premature mortality in Belgium over the period 1998-2019.

Methods: We used the 2001 and 2011 Belgian Indices of Multiple Deprivation to assign statistical sectors, the smallest geographical units in the country, into deprivation deciles.

Measuring small-area level deprivation in Belgium: The Belgian Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Background: In the past, deprivation has been mostly captured through simple and univariate measures such as low income or poor educational attainment in research on health and social inequalities in Belgium. This paper presents a shift towards a more complex, multidimensional measure of deprivation at the aggregate level and describes the development of the first Belgian Indices of Multiple Deprivation (BIMDs) for the years 2001 and 2011.

Methods: The BIMDs are constructed at the level of the smallest administrative unit in Belgium, the statistical sector.

Inequalities in mortality associated with housing conditions in Belgium between 1991 and 2020.

Background: Poor housing conditions have been associated with increased mortality. Our objective is to investigate the association between housing inequality and increased mortality in Belgium and to estimate the number of deaths that could be prevented if the population of the whole country faced the mortality rates experienced in areas that are least deprived in terms of housing.

Methods: We used individual-level mortality data extracted from the National Register in Belgium and relative to deaths that occurred between Jan.

Impact of Short-Term Exposure to Extreme Temperatures on Mortality: A Multi-City Study in Belgium.

In light of climate change, health risks are expected to be exacerbated by more frequent high temperatures and reduced by less frequent cold extremes. To assess the impact of different climate change scenarios, it is necessary to describe the current effects of temperature on health. A time-stratified case-crossover design fitted with conditional quasi-Poisson regressions and distributed lag non-linear models was applied to estimate specific temperature-mortality associations in nine urban agglomerations in Belgium, and a random-effect meta-analysis was conducted to pool the estimates.