Association of lung cancer incidence and COVID-19 case fatality with income level in Ohio.
110 Background: Social determinants of health (SDOH) have an impact of health and quality-of-life. However, most models of clinical disease and risk calculators do not incorporate SDOH. Many diseases have residual, unexplained risk after known risk factors have been incorporated. SDOH is important component of this residual risk and resources should be allocated to study their relation to disease. Here, we investigate the role of SDOH on the incidence and severity of respiratory diseases by evaluating the association of income level with lung cancer incidence and COVID-19 case fatality ratio in the state of Ohio. Methods: Socioeconomic data for the state of Ohio was manually collected. Lung cancer incidence was acquired from the National Cancer Institute’s online portal. COVID-19 case fatality ratios were downloaded from Johns Hopkins University’s GitHub repository. All three datasets contained complete information for each of Ohio’s 88 counties and were merged by county name. The first two datasets are up-to-date as of 2019, while the COVID-19 data was up-to-date as of 22 May 2021. Data manipulation, visualization, and statistical inference was conducted in the R programming language. Results: Median county-level income across Ohio was $52,722 (IQR: 47,273-59,166). Median county-level lung cancer incidence was 68.4 per 100,000 population (IQR: 62.0-80.6) and median COVID-19 case fatality ratio was 1.98% (IQR: 1.65-2.36). Data for counties with highest and lowest median income are shown in table. Lung cancer incidence and COVID-19 case fatality ratio were not significantly correlated ( n = 88, p > 0.05). Median income was significantly correlated with both, lung cancer incidence ( r = -0.49, p < 0.001) and COVID-19 case fatality ratio ( r = -0.41, p < 0.001). This implies that 24% of the variation in lung cancer incidence and 17% of the variation in COVID-19 case fatality ratio in counties across Ohio can be explained by median county income. Conclusions: SDOH is significantly associated with the incidence and severity of infectious and oncologic respiratory diseases. This association is strengthened since the disease variables themselves are uncorrelated, decreasing the likelihood of confounding. COVID-19 incidence was not used because of uncertainty in the mechanism of SDOH affecting transmission. However, theories suggest that oncologic incidence and infectious disease treatment are affected by SDOH. We validate these theories and encourage the incorporation of SDOH into clinical care and public health. Future directions include testing the association between income level and lung cancer severity in clinical datasets from medical institutions in Ohio.[Table: see text]