Life-course influences on health and mortality

Several sociologists, notably Durkheim, argue that social mobility tends to bring about psychological distress. These theories are supported by recent empirical studies but the results are inconclusive. This article joins the line of research on the consequences of social mobility to examine the effect of intergenerational occupational mobility on subjective well-being in China, using data from the Chinese General Social Survey. This research extends prior studies by examining the full range of possible relationships among origins and destinations, on the one hand, and subjective well-being on the other. The results of this analysis show that the association between social mobility and subjective well-being is not linear. For those from farming and unskilled manual origins, upward mobility is associated with higher levels of happiness. For those from higher status origins, however, downward mobility is not necessarily associated with lower levels of happiness. Whereas the subjective well-being of the upwardly mobile is influenced to a greater degree by their current occupational positions, the subjective well-being of the downwardly mobile is influenced to a greater degree by their origins. While the findings indicate that social mobility has made the Chinese people as a whole psychologically better off.

The last century in Brazil witnessed profound social, economic and demographic changes. According to the Bureau of Census, female life expectancy at birth increased from 34.6 years in 1910 to 77.26 years in 2010. At the same time, the educational composition of the population has changed dramatically. In the 1940s, only 25 percent of the children aged 5 to 14 years were enrolled in school. Currently, nearly all children aged 7 and 14 years attend school, and positive advances in attendance rates have been also documented for the secondary and tertiary education. In this article, we examine the extent to which changes in the age-specific distribution of education, between 1960 and 2010, have contributed to the decline in adult mortality among women in Brazil. Our analysis follows other applications in the literature (e.g. Preston and Stokes 2011) to measure the reduction in mortality that would occur if exposure to specific risk factors were changed to a counterfactual level, also known as the population attributable fraction. The effects are not trivial: about 41% of life expectancy gains at age 30, between 1960 and 2010, are attributable to changes in educational composition of the female population.

The changes in the age structure of the population, poverty or migration are often used to justify violence rates in Latin American countries, although there are no conclusive studies on this relationship. The bibliography that lists inequalities and violence, taking countries as analysis unities, indicates that the higher the socioeconomic heterogeneity greater violence. But studies comparing cities or neighborhoods of the same city show apparently contradictory results. For the Metropolitan Region of Campinas (MRC), Brazil, Aidar and Soares (2006) found that victimization against urban violence is higher in homogeneous areas, with low-income residents, than in more heterogeneous areas. The rate of homicides in the MRC has grown from 7.3 to 38.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants between 1980 and 2000. However, the trend seems to be reversing and the rate fell to 14 homicides per 100,000 in 2010. This paper studies violence in the MRC, analyzing mortality by homicides from a demographic and spatial perspective. These analyses aim to contribute to a wider understanding on the evolution of mortality by violent causes, its interaction with the physical and social spaces of the metropolitan areas, adding to this contribution the systematization, analysis e search for quality of available information.

In this paper, an attempt is made to examine the feeding practices of children by religious groups is carried out to know the differences in child mortality of children by religious groups. The Hindu-Muslim gap in neonatal mortality is quite significant. An attempt is made here to compare the breastfeeding and complimentary feeding pattern by religion. Initial breastfeeding and duration of breastfeeding is not significantly different among these religious groups. Moreover, antenatal care, delivery care and postnatal care is better among Hindus in comparison to Muslims (NFHS-3). Intake of micronutrients namely Vitamin A and iron rich food is better among Muslim children in comparison to Hindus. ARI and fever prevalence is found higher among Muslims whereas treatment of these two diseases is better among Hindus. However, management of diarrhea is better among Muslims. Intake of micronutrients and better management of diarrhea may be reducing the child mortality among Muslim in comparison to Hindus.

Background: Inequalities in diseases act as a brake on economic development. Extant literature is full of studies on regional inequalities in maternal and child health in India, but studies examining regional inequalities in the occurrence of diseases are limited.
Objective: Data from India Human Development Survey conducted in 2004-05 is used to test hypotheses: first, diseases are uniformly distributed among all regions of India; and second, there is no regional variation in the occurrence of risk factors.
Methods: The present study had measured six outcome variables namely occurrence of TB, mental illness, cancer, diabetes, high BP and heart disease. The other outcome variables were risk factors like smoking, chewing tobacco, alcohol drinking and living in crowding condition. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used.
Results: Findings of the study reject the both hypothesis. There are enormous regional inequalities in the occurrence of diseases. Interestingly there is no single pattern in the occurrence of diseases among regions. Some diseases have a high prevalence in a particular region, but other disease has a very low prevalence in that particular region.

Thomas McKeown (1912—88) was best known for his interpretation of demographic trends. He concluded that improved nutrition played an important role in population growth. Following the publication of McKeown’s work on population his theories were widely criticised. This year (2013) the 25th anniversary of his death and it is appropriate to examine some of the developments in nutrition and public health that have occurred since his death that provide support for his theory.
The science of nutrition has made great advances since the McKeown began his work and we are now aware of the value of adequate nutrition in reducing rates of nutrition and infection. In the Asia Pacific region improvement in population nutritional status as shown by height, is paralleled by declines in child mortality and increases in life expectancy. This is illustrated by data from China, Korea, Japan and Australia where the decline in infant mortality and total mortality in Australia parallels the increase in height of the population. But population health is also influenced by a rise in chronic disease, which is due in part to poor nutrition in the first 1000 days of life interacting with changes in nutrition and lifestyle later in life.

This paper explores the relationship between place of residence (urban/rural) during childhood and sexual behavior of Malawian men. Data from approximately 1300 men aged 18 to 40 are used in the analysis. Men raised predominantly in rural areas, initiate sex later (approximately 1 year later than those raised predominantly in urban areas), but experience fertility (2.2 children). The relationship between sexual behavior practices and the cumulative amount of time lived in an urban area shows that the longer an individual resides in an urban area the more frequently he will use a condom, after about 10 years the relationship flattens. This suggests that migrants adjust their behavior over time but it is a relatively slow adjustment. In a context with high HIV rates (higher in rural areas) and a high urbanization rate it suggests that HIV prevention policies should be targeted to such groups to accelerate this condom adoption process.

The conventional trickle-down model of community effects on body weight status is theoretically flawed. A better understanding of the association between community contextual effects and youth’s body weight status is needed to improve the existing theory and inform public health policy. We propose to integrate an ecological approach with a life course perspective and introduce human agency and its dynamic interactions with contextual factors into our model. Drawing upon longitudinal and multilevel data, we study body weight changes captured by both general and central obesity measures in Chinese youth. We employ a difference-in-difference model to adjust for “pretreatment heterogeneity bias”. We examine three dimensions of individual agency and their interactions with urbanization and fast-food restaurant, two important community factors in China, and thereby account for “treatment effect heterogeneity bias”. Our preliminary results highlight some complex patterns of body weight changes as Chinese youth transitioned from early childhood to late adolescence.

Evidence on trends in prevalence of disease and disability can clarify whether countries are experiencing a compression or expansion of morbidity. The prevalence of chronic diseases and risk factors appears to have been increasing in both Europe and other developed countries indicating an expansion of morbidity as indicated by disease. It is likely that better treatment, preventive measures (such as cancer screening and treatment of cardiovascular risk factors) and increases in education levels have contributed to the declines in mortality and increases in life expectancy. It should be noted that, the increases in presence of disease appear to be less associated with disability. This paper examines whether there has been an expansion or compression of morbidity in Spain. It uses trends in mortality and morbidity from major causes of death and links of these with mortality to provide estimates of life expectancy with and without diseases and loss of functioning. The analysis uses a repeated cross-sectional Spanish health survey in 2001 and 2009 for measues of morbidity, the Spanish National Health Survey, mortality information comes from the National Statistics Institute database. Increasing survival among people with diseases can lead to a higher prevalence of diseases in the older population.

Many people in the developing world go without health care from which they could benefit greatly. Beyond this, there are evidences that the health care needs of individuals differ greatly at different stages of their life cycle. High rural-urban migration further compounds the health problems of urban residents. The lifecycle has been divided into four stages which are 0-5 years, 6-15 years, 16-59 years and those that are 60 years and above.The classification is determined by the structure of health risk faced by different age groups. This study examines health care demand over the life cycle in urban areas of Nigeria. Although there is no panel data on household living standard in Nigeria, we have done our analysis for a single year but consider different age group using a cross sectional data. The data set used for this study is the 2004 Nigerian Living Standard Survey (NLSS). The study used the Nested Multinomial Logit Models (NMNL) estimation techniques. Our tentative findings while parental education and occupational structure are important determinants of child demand for health care, self- income and educational level are the most important determinants for those aged 16-59 years old.