Glasgow effect

"[4] Although lower income levels are generally associated with poor health and a shorter lifespan, epidemiologists have argued that poverty alone does not appear to account for the disparity found in Glasgow.

[11] Several hypotheses have been proposed to account for the ill health, including the practice in the 1960s and 1970s of offering young, skilled workers in Glasgow social housing in new towns, leaving behind a demographically "unbalanced population".

[12][13] Other suggested factors have included a high prevalence of premature and low birthweight births, land contaminated by toxins, a high level of derelict land, more deindustrialisation than in comparable cities, poor social housing, religious sectarianism, lack of social mobility,[14] vitamin D deficiency, cold winters, higher levels of poverty than the figures suggest, adverse childhood experiences and childhood stress, high levels of stress in general, and social alienation.

[27] In a publication introducing the GCPH, the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, Harry Burns, referred 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.

[28] A GCPH report in 2016 concluded that certain historical processes and policy decisions had left the city more vulnerable to deprivation.

[29][30][31][13] Factors include the "lagged effects" of overcrowding and the former practice, in the 1960s and 1970s, of offering young, skilled workers social housing in new towns outside Glasgow; this, according to a 1971 government document, threatened to leave behind an "unbalanced population with a very high proportion of the old, the very poor and the almost unemployable".