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The Glasgow effect refers to the unexplained poor health and low life expectancy of residents of Glasgow, Scotland, compared to the rest of the United Kingdom and Europe.
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Though lower income levels are generally associated with poor health and shorter lifespan, the prevailing hypothesis among epidemiologists is that poverty alone does not appear to account for the health disparity found in Glasgow. Equally deprived areas of the UK such as Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester have higher life expectancies, and the wealthiest ten percent of the Glasgow population have a lower life expectancy than the same group in other cities.
Several hypotheses have been proposed to account for the effect, including vitamin D deficiency, cold winters, higher levels of poverty than the figures suggest, high levels of stress, and social alienation.
Mortality rates
Research led by David Walsh of the Glasgow Centre for Population Health in 2010 concluded that the deprivation profiles of Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester are almost identical, but premature deaths in Glasgow are over 30 percent higher, and all deaths around 15 percent higher, across almost the entire population.
The city's mortality rates are the highest in the UK and among the highest in Europe. With a population of 1.2 million in greater Glasgow, life expectancy at birth is 71.6 years for men, nearly seven years below the national average of 78.2 years, and 78 years for women, over four years below the national average of 82.3. According to the World Health Organization in 2008, the life expectancy for men in the Calton area of Glasgow was 54 years. A local doctor attributed this to alcohol and drug abuse, and a violent gang culture.
Hypotheses
Epidemiologists are unable to explain the mortality gap, which was not apparent until 1950 and seems to have widened since the 1970s. The Economist wrote in 2012: "It is as if a malign vapour rises from the Clyde at night and settles in the lungs of sleeping Glaswegians."
Hypotheses include vitamin D deficiency caused by lack of sunlight, more poverty than the figures suggest, cold winters, high levels of stress, a culture of alienation, and pessimism brought on by the lingering effects of industrialisation and the city's more recent deindustrialisation. Yet in comparison to other similarly deindustrialised European cities, Glasgow's 15 percent higher mortality rate persists.
The Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, Harry Burns, referred in 2004 to research suggesting that chronically activated stress responses, especially in children, affect the structure of parts of the frontal lobes of the brain, and that these determine the physical reaction to stress, which could result in chronic ill health. The ability to attain good health, he suggested, depends in part on whether people feel in control of their lives, and whether they see their environments as threatening or supportive.