Kyoto University · Social Sciences
Professor Shiho Kino's research lab focuses on social determinants of health, particularly the interplay between socioeconomic status, health behaviors, and mental health outcomes. The lab investigates how policy interventions—such as health insurance expansion and Medicaid reforms—affect health disparities and access to care, with a strong emphasis on equity and resilience in vulnerable populations. Using innovative methods including machine learning to analyze non-traditional data sources, the lab explores causal pathways and algorithmic fairness in public health research. A central theme is understanding and reducing social inequalities in health through evidence-based policy and community-level interventions.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
While ML equips researchers with new ways to measure health outcomes and their determinants from non-conventional sources such as text, audio, and image data, most studies still rely on traditional surveys. Although there are no guarantees that ML will lead to better social epidemiological research, the potential for innovation in SDH research is evident as a result of harnessing the predictive power of ML for causality, data curation, or algorithmic fairness.
There were clear socioeconomic gradients in clusters of health-related behaviours. The findings highlight the importance of adopting interventions that address multiple health risk behaviours and policies that tackle the social determinants of health-related behaviours.
In this study, mental illness symptoms persisted for more than 5 years among half of disaster survivors, but the community-wide prevalence of depression remained stable, suggesting that the community itself was resilient.
The ACA Medicaid expansion had mixed effects on socioeconomic disparities in health care utilization. Medicaid expansion may not be sufficient to address socioeconomic disparities in preventive services uptake.
Our results indicate that in order to reduce unwanted social isolation and loneliness among older Japanese adults, in the first instance the focus should be on those individuals who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and unhealthy.
Improved access to health insurance contributed to reducing worry and stress associated with paying rent/mortgage or purchasing meals among low-income people. Expanding health insurance access may have contributed to increasing the disposable income of low income groups.
Older recipients of public welfare have a higher prevalence of suicidal behaviour in Japan. An urgent focus is now warranted on this vulnerable population to determine the specific factors underlying this association.
<i>Background</i>. Health insurance access and health literacy are critical components of "enabling resources" to encourage uptake of services. We sought to test whether health literacy boosts health services utilization in the context of expanded access to health insurance stemming from the Affordable Care Act. <i>Method</i>. We used individual-level data from 11 states included in the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System 2016. We conducted a two-stage least squares instrumental variables
This study examined inequalities in dental check-ups and medical screenings using subjective and objective socioeconomic indicators. Data from 23,464 adults, aged 20 years old and over, who participated in a multi-national survey across Europe (Eurobarometer 72.3) were analysed. Participants' socioeconomic position (SEP) was measured by education, difficulty in paying bills and subjective social status. Use of preventive services was measured by attendance for dental check-ups, cancer and cardio
The findings suggest that greater governmental support for the healthcare and better characteristics of healthcare system are positively associated with routine dental attendance.
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