Sort America's neighborhoods into ten bins by the Area Deprivation Index and walk from the least-deprived tenth to the most-deprived. How much worse does each measure get? Putting all 26 on a single relative scale — each line starts at 1.0× in the least-deprived decile — makes the answer legible at a glance: 6 of the 26 measures at least double by the time you reach the most-deprived tenth.
The deprivation gradient, all 26 measures at once
Burden relative to the least-deprived decile (log scale) — hover a line or label to isolate it
Teeth are the body's deprivation index
It is fitting that the steepest gradient belongs to dentistry. Complete tooth loss is cumulative, cheap to prevent, expensive to treat, poorly covered by insurance, and almost perfectly classed — which makes a senior's smile one of the most legible records of a lifetime of neighborhood deprivation that epidemiology has.
What the gradient leaves alone
Three lines barely move, and each is a lesson. Cancer prevalence (0.96×) is nearly flat because it mostly tracks age, and deprived neighborhoods skew younger — flatness here is an artifact of who lives where, not equity in cancer risk. Loneliness (1.06×) is almost evenly distributed: the most isolated places in America are not the poorest, they are the youngest and densest. And binge drinking runs backwards (0.81× — that is, 19% lower in the most-deprived decile), the one health behavior that rises with affluence.
The gradient, in other words, is not a law of nature that drags every measure equally. It bites hardest where prevention is priced out of reach — and it spares the burdens that answer to age and density instead of income.