Social determinants of health and vascular diseases. A systematic review and call for action

Several factors that underlie health inequality have been studied and defined as the social determinants of health (SDHs). The main SDHs are gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and ethnicity. In this study, disparity was analyzed in the context of vascular diseases (VDs) such as Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD), Chronic Venous Disease (CVD), Abdominal Arterial Aneurysm (AAA), and Carotid Stenosis (CS). This article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the published evidence of the SDHs in VDs. For this purpose, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were used. Published articles using the Scopus and ScienceDirect databases were searched. The criteria for the articles’ inclusion/exclusion were decided using a modified PICOTS framework. For the selected articles, the data sheets were organized in such a way to extract all data of potential relevance. Our findings showed that in VDs, gender, SES, and ethnicity are very important, with some specific problems for VDs analyzed. In conclusion, having detected the presence of SDHs that act negatively on VDs, a model based on action items for the SDHs associated with VDs was proposed.