The role of early- and midlife conditions for healthy aging in Europe

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.