Cross-country comparison of changes in health in U.S., England, Mexico, Taiwan, and Indonesia

Health status at older ages around the globe has changed due to changes in epidemiological environment, diet/nutrition, medical technology, public and individual health practices. But the change is likely to vary across countries with different economic, epidemiological, and policy circumstances. Using 2 waves of nationally representative datasets from 5 countries with varying income levels, we examine changes in biological risk in US, England, Mexico, Taiwan and Indonesia. Biological risk factors include systolic and diastolic blood pressure (BP), BMI, total, HDL cholesterol, and HbA1c. Our analysis includes those age 50+ who participated in physical exam and blood collection. We find patterns of age-specific onset of high-risk levels of biological risk vary across countries. No single country has the highest or lowest onset levels for all factors. A relatively low-income country, Indonesia, has the highest onset rates for high BP, though its rate of overweight onset is the lowest;while the high-income countries (US, England) have higher onset rates of overweight, their onset rates of high BP tend to be lower. The US had fairly high levels of onset of high HbA1c;England had relatively high levels of high cholesterol onset. Our findings indicate different levels of onset of biological risk across countries with different income.