Healthy life years and social engagement

Deeg and colleagues observe that since 2007 healthy life expectancy has not increased across European countries. Combined with the observation that total life expectancy has shown increases, this means that older people on average will spend more years in poor health. People in poorer health generally participate less in social activities than those in better health. Therefore, the question is addressed what is needed for older people in poor health to stay active in society. Using cross-European surveys, individual factors related to social engagement showed only minimal differences between older people in poor and in good health. Efforts at meso- and macro-level to improve the infrastructure for social engagement were identified. Expanding these may be more promising than focusing on individual factors to increase social engagement in older people in poor health

Volunteering, income and health

Separate literatures have related volunteering to health gains and income gains. We study the association between volunteering, income and health within one statistical framework. A state-of-the-art mediation analysis is conducted on data concerning the health, volunteering and sociodemographic characteristics of 42926 individuals within 29 European countries. We find that volunteering is positively associated to self-rated health. This association is partially mediated by household income

Volunteering as a productive ageing activity: the association with fall-related hip fracture in later life

his paper aims to contribute to the literature on the relationship between productive and healthy ageing as two key theoretical concepts in contemporary ageing. Specifically, volunteering as a productive activity in later life has been associated with social and health benefits for older people. Evidence from the literature has generally focused on global outcomes, such as mortality and self-rated health, or on measures of psychological well-being. This study explored whether volunteering is protective of an important adverse health outcome in later life, that of fall-related hip fracture, utilising data from a case control study of 387 participants. The results showed that volunteer activity in older age remained significantly protective of hip fracture risk [OR: 0.61 (0.38–0.99)], independent of social and physical activity, social support and health status, supporting the hypothesis of a relationship between the concepts of productive and healthy ageing. Whilst further studies are clearly needed to establish causality, these results suggest that health benefits of volunteering in later life might be more extensive than previous studies have show