Life-course influences on health and mortality

To date, no study has satisfactorily addressed the relationship between social mobility and mortality in China’s context. The present paper examines how grandparents’ status, parents' status and individuals' status together influence the physical well-being of individuals, using the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset-Liaoning (CMGPD-LN). A mobility-Path model is proposed to estimate effects of specific components in individual mobility course for three generations. Results show that mobility itself has effects on mortality risks. The relative effects of grandfather position, father position and individual position vary by individuals' childhood, early adulthood and late adulthood. Cumulative effects of socioeconomic circumstances over a lifetime are not obvious in the current analysis.

Over the years there has always been an interest in the relationship between the two important variables for people: marital status and health. With the development of economic and the society, the nature of marriage and family has changed a lot nowadays. In the case that the value of marriage is coming under increased scrutiny and many aspects of marital roles are changing, it is necessary to find whether or not marriage is still associated with enhanced well-being.
Data for this analysis come from the EASS (East Asian Social Survey) Health Module conducted in 2010. Our study found that, there are almost no significant impact of marital status on people’s subjective health condition and physical health, but there are significant impacts on people’s mental health and health related habits. The married people always feel calm and energetic more frequently than the unmarried people significantly, and the married couples always feel less depressed and downhearted. The health related living habits are also different between the married and the unmarried. Married people smoke significantly more frequently than unmarried people in China, but significantly less frequently than unmarried people in Japan and South Korea. Married people drink alcohol significantly more frequently than unmarried people in Japan.

Previous studies have shown that bereavement is associated with increased mortality. However, the amount and nature of post bereavement mortality can be assumed to differ by various circumstances surrounding widowhood. One such factor is the cause of death of the predecedent partner. We used data from a population registration database at Statistics Finland with detailed sociodemographic information to examine the excess mortality among those bereaved by two specific groups of causes of death of a predecedent spouse (altogeter 43 100 bereavement persons of whom 7 858 died during the follow-up). The method includes Cox regression model and the results are presented as hazard ratios (HRs). Among the widowed men and women, mortality from external causes of death was 4.69 -fold when the predecedent spouse had died from alcohol related death and as high as 10.09 -fold when the cause of death of the predecedent spouse was accidental and violent. Mortality risks were especially large soon after the death of a spouse. Immediate stress and the grief of bereavement are thus some of the causal mechanism leading from the loss of spouse to mortality. Support to those widowed should be a priority. Especially vulnerable are those bereaved by alcohol related causes of death or accidents and violence and soon after the bereavement.

This study aimed to identify the components of social participation in Korean society and to examine the processes through which the components of social participation influence the degree of suicidal ideation people experience across age groups. Survey data from the 2010 Seoul Welfare Panel Study were used. the aggregate dataset was categorised into three groups by respondents’ ages. The groups were defined as ‘young adults’ (aged 20-39), ‘middle-aged adults’ (aged 40-64) and ‘the elderly’ (age 65 or more). Three dimensions of social participation were identified by factor analysis – friendship network & hobby group, religious involvement and instrumental social participation. In the young adult group, only instrumental participation was statistically significant (-0.10, p=0.06). In the middle-aged adult group, only friendship network & hobby group had a strong association with suicidal ideation (-0.11, p=0.01). Interestingly, for the elderly, religious involvement was related to suicidal ideation, but in a positive way (0.26, p=0.02). After further analysis, it was concluded that there was a strong association between depression and suicidal ideation among the elderly. The study results showed that different components of social participation are associated with a lower risk of suicidal ideation across age groups.

Early-life effects on old-age mortality and how these effects may be
mediated by intermediate events are studied. Data come from 19th century northern Sweden in the form of digitized life trajectories from the Demographic Data Base, Umeå University, more specifically the Sundsvall region. The causal pathway from an exposure to an outcome is a topic that lately has been attracting strong attention. Of special interest is how to measure and estimate the mediating effect of factors on the causal pathway. We use infant mortality (IMR) at birth as a proxy for early-life conditions, and the mediator is socio-economic status (SES) in mid-life. The research question is thus: Is there an effect of IMR at birth on life expectancy after age 60, and if so, is this effect mediated by SES in mid-life, say around the age of 50?

We find strong direct effects from early-life conditions measured by IMR, but the indirect effects under investigation are weak.

Family resources may play an important role in the wellbeing of the elderly. In this paper, we examine the association between living arrangements and cognitive decline among people over 65 in nine European countries under the hypothesis that living with others (i.e. spouse or/and children) vis –à- vis living alone may have positive effects on maintaining cognitive functioning. To this end we used data from the first two waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which provides five indicators of cognitive functions: orientation, memory, recall, verbal fluency, and numeracy. Net of both the potential biases due to the selective attrition and the re-test effects, the evidence shows that the impact of living arrangement on cognitive decline depends on both the country and the type of cognitive examined.

This paper attempts a comparative analysis between disease and disability burden of elderly men and women in the context of relative deprivations of women in nutrition, health care, education etc. in childhood and adult ages, taking India as a case.

The data are culled out from Indian censuses and large scale surveys carried out during last three decades. The study variables are identified through a correlation analysis depicting linkage between disease and disability burden in old age and access to necessities of life in childhood and adult ages.

A time series analysis of prevalence of chronic diseases among elderly men and women at two points of time indicates that gender specific difference in the prevalence of chronic diseases in old age was quite minimal.

A multiple regression analysis between disease and disability burden of men and women and variables depicting deprivation to quality of life in childhood and adult ages did not show any significant effect of deprivation in childhood and adult ages on health status of women in old ages. Not only women are living longer, their health status is also at par with men.

Dementia is a major cause of disability and mortality among the elderly, it becomes early onset of dementia, when it occurs before the age of 60years. It is the loss of cognitive abilities, particularly the loss of memory; it is one of the most dreaded conditions of old age. Around 5% of the population aged 65 and above is affected by dementia, and its prevalence rises with the rate nearly doubling every 5 years. The paper examines the effects of EOD on QL of patients. The study used the key informant interview research tool to achieve its aim and objectives, thereby collecting data to answer its research questions. Purposive sampling was used, while ethnographic summary and content analysis were used to analyse the data. The results showed that the quality of life of patients with EOD is generally poor, in that the illness brings about the crippling of finance, loss of memory and independence, loss of position in the society. The study recommends detecting factors that can prevent or postpone the disease, and educating the public on OED. Such interventions would have a major positive public health impact and reduce some of the common fears and anxieties of becoming older.

We combined a life course perspective with a multilevel approach to analyze the impact of financial resources (both income and wealth) on self rated health over time in different countries and social systems. Therefore, we used the baseline interviews of the first two ways of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and the third wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), and combined these data with the recently published retrospective interviews from SHARELIFE and the life histories from ELSA to take childhood conditions (socio-economic background, health) and conditions in adulthood (number of illnesses, unemployment spells) into account. Country level differences were measured in terms of income inequality (gini coefficient) in a society. To disentangle how childhood and adulthood factors as well as contextual influences affect old age health,, structural equation models were used. Results show that income inequality has a small positive indirect effect on individual health, while the direct effect is negative, indicating that health status is negatively affected by the unequal distribution of resources in a society.

Quantifying women social and health status through data collection from household surveys is a key step to measure and monitor the achievements of development objective and MDGs. There are a number of robust survey tools to measure women status in the reproductive age, and few attempts to collect information about adolescence, menopause and elderly stages of women life in an integrated life course context. There is also evidence that a life course approach would provide an outstanding opportunity to understand the interaction across life stages and the impact of knowledge, perception and behavior in one stage on the consequent stages. While the literature introduced a theoretical framework on the lifecycle approach it lacked operational framework to serve an effective woman-centered development programs. This paper sheds lights on the insights of life course approach, and utilizes the lessons learned from Iraq Integrated Women Health and Social Status (I-WISH). It provides empirical evidence on the importance and value added for introducing a lifecycle survey tool, and points out the technical difficulties to develop such a tool. It calls for more effort to develop such a tool kit for the sake of further development in the field of the social research on women lifecycle health and social status.