THURSDAY, June 11, 2026 (NewsDay News) — Limited health literacy is common among primary care patients and is associated with poor health self-management skills, according to a study published online June 10. Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Abigail Vogeli, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and colleagues examined the prevalence of limited health literacy and health self-management among middle-aged adults and associations with self-reported physical function in cross-sectional analyses. A total of 942 average primary care patients in Chicago who participated in the Longitudinal Study of Aging were included in the analyses.
Overall, 13.2 percent of adults had low health literacy and 19.3 percent had disabilities. The researchers observed an association for lower health literacy with less education, lower income, unemployment, and identifying as black, Hispanic, or Hispanic/Latino. Those with low health literacy had more chronic conditions, more prescription drugs, and worse performance on the cognitive screen. Compared with those with adequate health literacy, individuals with low and minimal health literacy performed worse on health management tasks in multivariable models that controlled for age, race, sex, education, income, and number of chronic diseases. The relationship between health literacy and physical function was no longer significant after adjustment for covariates for the low or limited groups, although it was significant at baseline.
“Our findings show that health literacy is essential even in middle age,” Vogeli said in a statement. “Middle-aged adults are becoming older adults, so if we look at this from an optimistic perspective, this could be a place for intervention.”
The two authors revealed links to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.
