It is widely agreed that social factors are related to health outcomes: much research served to establish correlations between classes of social factors on the one hand and classes of disease on the other hand. However, why and how social factors are an active part in the aetiology of disease development is something that is gaining attention only recently in the health sciences and in the medical humanities. In this paper, we advance the view that, just as bio-markers help trace the causal continuum from exposure to disease development at the biological level, socio-markers ought to be introduced and studied in order to trace the social continuum from exposure to disease development. We explain how socio-markers differ from social indicators and how they can be used in combination with bio-markers in order to reconstruct the mixed mechanisms of health and disease, namely mechanisms in which both biological and social factors have an active causal role.

中文翻译：

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重建健康的混合机制：生物和社会标志物的作用

人们普遍认为社会因素与健康结果有关：许多研究有助于建立一方面社会因素类别与另一方面疾病类别之间的相关性。但是，为什么以及如何在疾病发展的病因学中积极发挥社会因素才是最近才在健康科学和医学人文科学中引起关注的问题。在本文中，我们提出以下观点：正如生物标志物有助于从生物学水平上追踪暴露于疾病发展的因果连续体一样，也应该引入和研究社会标志物，以便追溯疾病暴露于社会的连续体。发展。