The Worid Health Organization's (WHO) Commission on the Social Determinants of Health characterizes health disparities as arising from the """"""""immediate and structural conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age'V'^ these conditions are, in turn, shaped by political, social, and economic forces. The Commission's report makes three overarching recommendations to eliminate health disparities: 1) Improve the conditions of daily life - t he circumstances in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age; 2) Tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money, and resources - the structural drivers of those conditions - globally, nationally, and locally;and 3) Measure the problem, evaluate action, expand the knowledge base, develop a workforce that is trained in the social determinants of health, and raise public awareness about the social determinants of health.^ The proposed Mid-South TCC embodies the social structural, multilevel public health perspective implied by these recommendations. Addressing health disparities in terms of social determinants requires a complex, multidimensional effort that assumes a transdisciplinary approach involving multilevel research designs and complex analyses with a diverse range of measures across several research disciplines. In such a framework, research focused on a single level is misspecified because it underestimates the effects of contexts at other levels.""""""""'^ Only by integrating the various contexts in which an individual is embedded we can begin to develop valid models of risk. Toward this end, the objective of the proposed SDHM Core is to support Mid-South TCC's life-course transdisciplinary research exploring the etiology of chronic diseases and health inequalities across the Mid- South region.
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