Life-course influences on health and mortality

While chronologically old age is considered to begin from the sixties, biological maturity and ageing in the human body initiates much earlier. In women, menopause marks the beginning of such a process with sudden imbalance in the hormonal and physiological functions of the body.

Present paper aims at understanding age at menopause, its symptomatology and post-menopausal health problems among women of Assam, India.

Data were sourced from field survey of 447 menopausal women aged 40-55 years selected from urban, rural and tribal settings in Assam. Selection of respondents was purposive in nature and performed using quota sampling procedure.

Mean age at onset of menopause among India women is 47±2 years, those under study experiencing it as early as 44 years, much below the global and national average.

The most prominent symptoms were not the typical vasomotor symptoms of menopause (hot flushes/night sweats) rather those indicating their poor health, and are often associated with old-age. Ideally, the classic symptoms of menopause subside within a few years after menopause due to body’s internal mechanism to adjust to the natural changes. However, it was seen that among the women under study many of these problems intensified as they progressed to old age affecting their quality of life.

The present paper aims to explore the affect of poor reproductive health on type and age at menopause and post menopausal health status. A community-based retrospective study was conducted in India on 2,600 households. A sample of 247 women with menopause/hysterectomy (<50 years) was identified and interviewed.

Results indicate that the foundation for any health disability during middle age is often laid during the reproductive years. Abortion, age at first pregnancy, complications during last pregnancy, cesarean delivery, and heavy blood loss during menses were the reasons for hysterectomy. Women with higher education, high SLI, and late age at first pregnancy were found to be less vulnerable to early menopause. Religion, educational level, SLI, BMI, hysterectomy, high parity, abortion, complications during child birth, sterilization as contraception, and experience of irregularities during menopausal transition had the adverse effect on the health status of women after menopause and affected age at natural menopause.

With the increase in life expectancy, there is a need to look beyond the perspective in terms of providing care, as poor menstrual and maternal health not only affect a woman during reproductive ages, but also vibrates beyond reproduction. Segmentation of life can never lead to healthy life.

There are two aims in this study. The first is to estimate Healthy life expectancy in Sudan (HLE) using cross-sectional data (2008-2010). The second is to identify the most important risk factors affecting health status of population in the country.
Healthy life expectancies are calculated using models that incorporate measures of mortality and morbidity. Age-specific death rates account for the mortality component. Age-specific rates of population morbidity, disability, or some other aspect of health account for the morbidity component. These two components are combined using a mathematical function that transforms the two sets of partial measures into a single composite measure using a life table methodology.
National mortality data were obtained from two sources, the National Health Statistics (NHS, 2009) of Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) and fifth population census (CBS, 2008). Health data come from National Health Statistics (2009) of FMOH and the Sudan Household Health Survey (SHHS, 2010).
The life table techniques as well as the binary logistic regression models were used to estimate the (HLE) and to identify the risk factors of health status.
It is expected that a significant difference will be between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy due to the poor health status of population in Sudan.

We analyze the multi-faceted effects of poverty on the subjective well-being of individuals. Using panel data on more than 42,500 individuals living in Germany from 1993 to 2010 we show that self-reported satisfaction with life decreases as a result of both contemporaneous and past episodes of poverty. The intensity of contemporaneous poverty also plays an additional negative role. In addition, poor individuals prefer income stability so that persistent poverty is less harmful than the same number of years of low income experienced with movements in and out of poverty. The negative effects of being in poverty are permanent and do not vanish over time: individuals do not adapt to poverty, and, even when subsequently out of poverty, they report lower satisfaction with life. These effects differ by population subgroups.

The main objective of this study is to determine the risk factors associated with maternal deaths. More specifically, to study the extent of maternal health care services received prior to deaths. A case control study was carried out to collect the information on 50 cases and 150 controls from a selected district of Uttar Pradesh, India. The deaths were identified from multiple sources e.g. health facility/hospital records, ASHA and snow-ball sampling method. The husband of dead women or any other family member who could provide reliable information was interviewed. Frequency distribution and cross tabulation has been done. Further, to check the association with different variables unadjusted and adjusted odds ratios will be calculated. Preliminary result indicates that most of these deaths belong to scheduled castes and other backward classes. Mostly cases were illiterate. Utilization of pregnancy, delivery and post delivery care services among cases were poor in comparison to controls.

Large body of health literature has extensively reported the linearly aligned education gradient supporting thick theoretical building on the education gradient that has become one of few established facts. In this draft, we attempt to describe apparently contradictory empirical observations to the gradient argument: the recipients of the General Educational Development (GED) certificate. The NHIS data show that GED recipients enjoyed no advantage in the global health status measured by self-reported health over high school dropouts, which do not appear support the widely accepted education gradient. More rigorous analyses using the Add Health indicated that GED recipients who took GED credentials approximately seven years after high school enjoyed health benefits compared to high school dropouts but these benefits watered down six years later. GED credentials by 13 years after high school, however, did not make any distinguishable health differentials. We argue that these observations are related to psychological distress due to low socioeconomic status GED recipients went through in labor market.

Early life conditions have profound long-term health consequences over the life course. However, previous studies concentrate almost exclusively on the detrimental impact of fetal and early childhood malnutrition on adult health; by contrast, little attention has been paid to late childhood nutrition, which is also highly relevant in one’s growth trajectory and health outcome. This is the case especially in developing countries. We use data recently collected from a nationally representative sample survey of the Chinese population to explore the impact of late childhood nutrition intakes on adult health. The underlying linkage between childhood nutrition, adult height and a broad range of subjective and objective health indicators will be examined.

Population ageing is one of the dominant trends of the 21st century. Considering that morbidity is concentrated in the older population interventions to promote healthy ageing and healthy life expectancy are needed in order to offset the effects that ageing will have on population health. Health related behaviour use is a focal area for possible interventions since its association with various health outcomes is well documented. We used data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing with a formal approach for the identification of mediating factors in order to investigate the lifecourse socio-economic patterning of smoking, physical activity, dietary habits and alcohol use in later life. We observed socio-economic gradients in smoking, physical activity and alcohol use, but to a lesser extend in healthy dietary habits. Both early and later life socio-economic circumstances influenced health related behaviour, but these associations differed between men and women as well as between age groups. We found that early life circumstances influence behaviour either directly or indirectly 65 years after and their effect reaches until early old age. The complexity of the observed associations highlights the need for further research on the mechanism that underlies the links between SEP and later life health related behaviour.

This study examines effect of rural-rural migration in the Northeastern Thailand where next to the Cambodia border which have a highly density of rural-rural migration. The purpose of move is seeking for land to grow cassava sugarcane corn etc. The research looks at effect of individual and household well being that affect probabilities to have infectious diseases such as malaria dengue fever diarrhea and HIV/AIDS. Data are from longitudinal survey of Nang Rong Project between 1984 and 2000. Number of sample is 28,298 individual, and 134 cases die because of infectious disease. Cause of death measured by verbal autopsy. Cox’s proportional hazard models are employed. Results show that, controlling for origin communities development factors such as accessing to sub-district health center, number of health personal in the communities, those who used to have rural-rural migration more than two months are more likely to die because of infectious disease. Males are more likely to die more than females. The younger age people are more likely to get contact to infectious disease than the older ages. Those who are under low level of socioeconomic well being which are measured from household assets and number of cattle household have are more likely to die because of the disease.

The influence of climatic factors on variations in adult height has been documented by different scholars over the last decade (Baten, 2002; Steckel and Rose, 2002; Komlos, 2003; and Koepke and Baten, 2005). This paper is based on individual data from a collection of previous anthropometric studies and newly available data from high-resolution palaeo-climate reconstructions and presents new evidence about climate as a determinant of human stature, being stature a health indicator and a measure to the standards of living. We first examine the complex relationship between humans and climate by presenting a new model that explores this relationship. We then evaluate the datasets and show results about the extent to which the climate has affected human stature in adults born in 10 countries located on Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America over the last 200 years.