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.

Variation in smoking attributable all-cause mortality across municipalities in Belgium, 2018: application of a Bayesian approach for small area estimations.

Background: Smoking is one of the leading causes of preventable mortality and morbidity worldwide, with the European Region having the highest prevalence of tobacco smoking among adults compared to other WHO regions. The Belgian Health Interview Survey (BHIS) provides a reliable source of national and regional estimates of smoking prevalence; however, currently there are no estimates at a smaller geographical resolution such as the municipality scale in Belgium. This hinders the estimation of the spatial distribution of smoking attributable mortality at small geographical scale (i.