About Syndemics 

NYTimes article that encompasses the syndemic framework: Now experts are calling for walkable communities, improved housing, and access to health care and better food, particularly in minority communities.

The President of Priority Health, a U.S.-based
health insurance company, describes his organization’s “full lifecycle” social determinants of health (SDOH) initiative, a series of interventions to address members’ SDOH and create health equity in the community.

The syndemics model of health focuses on the biosocial complex, which consists of interacting, co-present, or sequential diseases and the social and environmental factors that promote and enhance the negative e ects of disease interaction.

The larger lesson of COVID is that social and biological risk are deeply entangled. Viruses may cause disease in individuals, but pandemics play out in populations. This disease, like previous pandemics, reflects political, economic and social conditions. One way to understand these dynamics is through the concept of syndemics.

The deadly impact of the pandemic “is not caused by the virus acting alone but interacting with chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity, heart disease and high blood pressure — all against a background of inequality and poverty. We can’t fully control the infection without addressing those factors.”

There is also evidence that COVID-19 has a greater impact on social groups that experience greater social and economic inequality.8 Confirming the underlying hypothesis of syndemic theory, COVID-19 infection and mortality patterns have been shown to differ across countries and regions, and early evidence suggests that they depend at least to some extent on the social, political and economic context.

Researchers and commentators have called for COVID-19 to be considered a syndemic (3, 4). The notion seems to fit well with the emerging evidence on inequalities in vulnerability, susceptibility, exposure and transmission of the infection.

The syndemics model of health focuses on the biosocial complex, which consists of interacting, co-present, or sequential diseases and the social and environmental factors that promote and enhance the negative effects of disease interaction.

How we think about disease pathologies affects how we design policies and deliver care to those most affected by social and economic inequities.

Depressive symptoms are globally recognized as a significant mental health problem in patients with chronic disease, particularly those with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). The purpose of this study was to estimate the prevalence and examine bio-psychosocial factors of depressive symptoms among patients with SLE.

Syndemic theory considers how social inequalities drive disease interaction. A new study uses a mixed-methods approach to examine how stress interacts with multiple diseases to affect quality of life in Soweto, South Africa.