Life-course influences on health and mortality

The linkage between socio-economic status, personal control beliefs and health outcomes among the elderly (60+) in Russia is investigated. Particular form of health outcomes is adressed - mental health symptoms prevalence: depression and anxiety . As indicated in previous literature, depression is the third largest cause of years of life lost due to premature mortality and morbidity (Murray, Lopez, 2004).
There are some studies linking poverty and mental disorders (Patel, Kleinman, 2001), others analyze the impact of social ties (Kawachi,Berkman, 2001).
This research looks at SES and education levels predicting mental health disorders. Social cohesion and support are tested to mediate this influence. SAGE (WHO) Wave 1 (2007-2010) data is used to build multifactorial model to support hypotheses that lack of social ties is stronger predictor of mental health symptoms than lower SES.

Unlike previous migration studies which mainly focus on individual migration, this article examines the long-term mortality consequences of childhood migration and resettlement. Using a unique Chinese historical population database, we trace 30517 males from childhood onwards between 1792 and 1909, 542 of whom experienced childhood migration. We apply discrete-time event-history analysis and include a fixed effect of common grandfather to account for unobservable characteristics of the extended family. We also explore the influence of social networks on early-life migration experience by including kin network at destination. Our findings suggest that migration in childhood has substantial long-term effects on survivorship in later ages. From age 16 to 45, kin network at destination mediates the negative effects of childhood migration and lowers mortality risks. Moreover, child migrants who survive to older ages subsequently experience lower mortality. Such findings contribute to a better understanding of the implications of social behavior and social context for human health.

Living together creates the conditions for a spouse’s health to be inter-related with the health of the other spouse, especially among middle-aged or older couples. The article explores the association between the determinants of a couple’s health and a set of biomarkers, through a system of simultaneous equations –one for each spouse, as well as secondary equations for controlling endogeneity– using a dataset of middle-aged adults from Costa Rica. There are positive correlations between the errors of the paired equations, although the size of the correlations is relatively small (around 0.10). Individual and economic variables do not seem to have a strong effect on health, but self-reported stress is related with both own and spouse’s health. Female spouse´s self-reported stress is directly associated with male’s levels of cholesterol, HDL, and CRP, while male spouse´s stress is positively associated with several female health variables: cholesterol, HDL, HbA1C, and systolic blood pressure.

This paper examines the effects of exposure to the Spanish flu during infancy and in-utero, identified as critical periods in the physiological development of the individual, on socio-economic position and health in later life. The data used is from the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database, which includes individual level longitudinal data, both demographic and economic, for five rural parishes in southern Sweden, from the nineteenth century until today. In this paper we focus on the birth cohorts born between 1912 and 1925. We have previously shown that those born immediately before the Spanish flu and exposed in the first year of life are less able to reach higher socio-economic positions than cohort born before or afterwards (Bengtsson and Helgertz 2012). In this paper we expand this analysis by following these cohorts until later in life to examine lasting health impacts of the Spanish flu. Doing so we take both direct and indirect effects—via income and socio-economic position—into account by making use of a structural equation modeling approach. The overall finding is that exposure to the Spanish flu in first year of life affects both economic outcomes and health in older ages, and that health is affected directly, not via income and socio-economic position.

Mortality research highlights the surprisingly low mortality of migrants to Europe and the US, despite their imminent disadvantages. Three main mechanisms may contribute to these patterns: 1) the so called “salmon effects” in mortality, being produced by situations when migrants opt to return to their country of origin in anticipation of death, 2) selective immigration of healthy migrants, and 3) the under-reporting of emigration. In our study, we test these hypotheses by focusing on the migration effects that may occur within a single country. We apply hazard regression to Swedish population registers to examine the age, duration-specific and time-varying influences of migration status on individual mortality during 1971-2007. The study covers 11.9 million Swedish born. About 473,000 people were born in Norrland and had moved, about 131,000 of them had returned. To distinguish between healthy-migrant and salmon effects we ask whether migrants from Norrland to Southern Sweden have lower mortality than the general population of Norrland and lower mortality than the population of Southern Sweden, whether return migrants to Norrland have a higher mortality than those who stay in the South, and whether patterns are altered by age. First results confirm that both mechanisms can be observed for the internal migrants in Sweden.

We study mortality selection in the first 90 days of life. Using micro-data for a region with internal strong mortality differences before mortality transition, we try to understand if children who survived a strong risk of death during the first three months of life (q0-2) were “selected”, i.e. they had higher probability of surviving during the following 33 months (q3-35). The neonatal selection process played a non negligible role in determining the post-neonatal mortality level in Veneto during 1816-35. For the cohorts where neonatal mortality selection was severe (q0-2>40%), the hazard ratio of surviving during the following 33 months was 20/30% lower than for the cohort where neonatal mortality selection was relatively small (q0-2<20%). This result suggests a sort of homeostatic mechanism, as the mortality differences in q0-35 are lower than the mortality differences in q0-2 and q3-35.

Using data from the longitudinal survey “Family and Social Subjects” carried out by ISTAT in two waves ( 2003 and 2007), this paper investigates the consequences of marital dissolution on individual subjective wellbeing in Italy. A key problem is disentangling causal effects, a challenge when the interplay between life course pathways and states of mind is investigated. Here we use propensity score matching estimates applied to panel data to estimates the impact of divorce or separation on a set of dimensions of subjective wellbeing. After a comparison among individuals with very similar profiles in terms of economic and social characteristics, results show as marital breakdown in Italy has a strong impact not only in reducing material well-being, but also on several dimensions of perceived subjective wellbeing, introducing uncertainty in the future (a form of psychological distress) with respect to housing, income and familiar conditions.

Fever remains a commonest symptom of malaria. This study was designed to investigate the fever prevalence and fever patterns in Rufiji Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS).We conducted cross-sectional household survey from all population in HDSS site to enquire about fever and treatment behaviour in two weeks prior the survey. A logistic regression model was fitted to assess the factors associated with fever. A total of 63,706 people were interviewed and 3.3% reported having fever in the two weeks preceding the survey. The prevalence of fever was more common for under-five children at 6.5 % compared to 2.8% for the remaining population. Children less than five were more likely to be febrile than older children and adults (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) =0.40; 95%CI 0.36-0.45). Fever prevalence was more common for females compared to males (aOR=1.17; 95% CI: 1.07-1.28). Larger households were observed to be a risk factor for fever in the study (aOR=0.55; 95% CI: 0.43-0.74). Socio- economic status, availability of improved drinking water and toilet were not significantly associated with fever. Fever prevalence was observed to be low in the study area. As an important indicator of malaria, it reflects an encouraging development in malaria control efforts.

This paper uses a parametric stochastic frontier approach (coming from the economic literature) to explore the impact of the occupational activities and the living conditions in the slums on the health performance among the adult population aged 50 and up. We measure the health performance using the disability scores from the WHO. In our estimation strategy, we first consider the WHODAS II – 12 items score and thereafter simultaneously analyze several dimensions of health state description (cognitive, mobility, pain and discomfort, sleep and affect, etc.). We use individual data from the WHO’s Study on Global AGEing and Adult Health (SAGE) in partnership with the INDEPTH network. The SAGE-INDEPTH survey provides longitudinal data on ageing in various Demographic surveillance sites (DSS) in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ghana. This survey collects information on the older persons’ health profiles, economic activities, cares and supports provided and received, and a broad range of self-reported assessments of health and well-being.

This study investigates the role of unobserved frailty on the estimation of mortality differentials from age 50 on by education level. We used data of a 36 years follow up from the Turin Longitudinal Study containing 391,170 men and 456,216 women. We fitted survival analysis models with and without the unobserved heterogeneity component, controlling for mortality improvement from a cohort and a period perspective. We found that in the majority of the cases, the models without frailty estimated a smaller educational gradient then the models with frailty. During the post war industrialization Turin was the destination of many immigrants from the South of Italy. By adopting a period and cohort perspective and controlling for the individual region of birth we found that the migration flow is likely to have reduced male heterogeneity and the educational gradient.