Marital status and mortality

Spouses of centenarians have a survival advantage compared to their birth cohort. However, less is understood about the pathways by which spousal similarity in exceptional survival exactly operates. This study investigates whether positive homogamy and/or shared environment are related to the resemblance among spouses and how it can explain why spouses of centenarians are more likely to achieve a very long life span. Our sample consists of 850 validated French-Canadian centenarians who died between 1985-2005, and their spouses. Using early-life family variables gathered from the 1901 and 1911 censuses and measuring the social level of the family, we investigate through homogamy models and logit models if there is a tendency to partner with individuals of the same social origin. Consideration will mainly be given to the Assortative Mating hypothesis, which argues that spousal concordance in health and longevity is largely a result of a selective process through which individuals choose partners based on a similar social origin and shared childhood characteristics, and to the Shared Resources Hypothesis. Results could shed light on the extent to which spousal concordance in longevity is channelled through social origin in early life and could put forward the impact of lifecourse events in achieving old-age mortality.

How socio-demographic characteristics could explain extreme longevity? In this contribution we consider beside age and sex the matrimonial history and the living arrangement trajectory. Data used are extracted from the continuous registration system in Belgium. Compared to longitudinal surveys, administrative data are also suitable for longitudinal studies. They give less information but include the date of death with the situation of the person at death. The method used is survival analysis. 3000 Belgian centenarians are concerned including 659 men. Most centenarians were widowed at death, few were still married while 274 women and 32 men were never married. Among female centenarians, 55% were younger compared to their husband while for male centenarians, 81% were older. Early widowhood favours longevity for women but not for men. For living arrangement, more than half of the centenarians were institutionalized at death but the timing of their entry in nursing home is later compared to the total population. Living in married couple is protective but being single and living alone is also profitable for women only. Concerning the impact of the living arrangement trajectory on survival to extreme ages, living in institution increases mortality risk but this effect decreases at older ages.

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.

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.