Childhood Predictors of Late-Life Diabetes: The Case of Mexico

We investigated the interplay between characteristics of early childhood circumstances and current socioeconomic conditions and health, focusing specifically on diabetes in mid and late life in Mexico. The analysis used data from the 2001 Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS), a large nationally representative study of Mexicans born before 1950. We analyzed the extent to which childhood conditions, such as exposure to infectious diseases, a poor socioeconomic environment, and parental education, affect the risk of diabetes in later life. Our results indicate that individuals age 50 and older who experienced serious health problems before age 10 have a higher risk of having late-life diabetes. There is a significant inverse relationship between maternal education and diabetes in late life of adult offspring. Individuals with better educated mothers have a lower risk of being diabetic after age 50. This relationship remains after controlling for other childhood and adult risk factors

Cross-Cohort Differences in Health on the Verge of Retirement

Baby Boomers have left a unique imprint on US culture and society in the last 60 years, and it might be anticipated that they will also put their own stamp on retirement, the last phase of the life cycle. Yet because Boomers have not all fully retired, we cannot yet judge how they will fare as retirees. Instead, we focus on how this group compares with prior groups on the verge of retirement, that is, at ages 51-56. Accordingly, this chapter evaluates the stock of health which Early Boomers bring to retirement and compare these to the circumstances of two prior cohorts at the same point in their life cycles. Using three sets of responses from the Health and Retirement Study, we find some interesting patterns. Overall, the raw evidence indicates that Boomers on the verge of retirement are in poorer health their counterparts 12 years ago. Using a summary health index designed for this study, we find that those born 1948 to 1953 share health risks with the War Baby cohort. This suggests that most of the health decline instead began before the late 1940's. A more complex set of health conclusions emerges from the specific self-reported health measures. Boomers indicate they have relatively more difficulty with a range of everyday physical tasks, but they also report having more pain, more chronic conditions, more drinking and psychiatric problems, than their HRS earlier counterparts. This trend portends poorly for the future health of Boomers as they age and incur increasing costs associated with health care and medications. Using our health index, only those at the 75th percentile or higher are likely to be characterized as having good or better health.

Cross-Cohort Differences in Health on the Verge of Retirement

Baby Boomers have left a unique imprint on US culture and society in the last 60 years, and it might be anticipated that they will also put their own stamp on retirement, the last phase of the life cycle. Yet because Boomers have not all fully retired, we cannot yet judge how they will fare as retirees. Instead, we focus on how this group compares with prior groups on the verge of retirement, that is, at ages 51-56. Accordingly, this chapter evaluates the stock of health which Early Boomers bring to retirement and compare these to the circumstances of two prior cohorts at the same point in their life cycles. Using three sets of responses from the Health and Retirement Study, we find some interesting patterns. Overall, the raw evidence indicates that Boomers on the verge of retirement are in poorer health their counterparts 12 years ago. Using a summary health index designed for this study, we find that those born 1948 to 1953 share health risks with the War Baby cohort. This suggests that most of the health decline instead began before the late 1940’s. A more complex set of health conclusions emerges from the specific self-reported health measures. Boomers indicate they have relatively more difficulty with a range of everyday physical tasks, but they also report having more pain, more chronic conditions, more drinking and psychiatric problems, than their HRS earlier counterparts. This trend portends poorly for the future health of Boomers as they age and incur increasing costs associated with health care and medications. Using our health index, only those at the 75th percentile or higher are likely to be characterized as having good or better health

Using Anthropometric Indicators for Mexicans in the United States and Mexico to Understand the Selection of Migrants and the Hispanic Paradox

Anthropometric measures including height provide an indication of childhood health that allows exploration of relationships between early life circumstances and adult health. Height can also be used to provide some indication of how early life health is related to selection of migrants and the Hispanic paradox in the United States. This article joins information on persons of Mexican nativity ages 50 and older in the United States collected in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey IV (NHANES IV 1999-2002) with a national sample of persons of the same age living in Mexico from the Mexican Health and Aging Survey (MHAS 2001) to examine relationships between height, education, migration, and late-life health. Mexican immigrants to the United States are selected for greater height and a high school, rather than higher or lower, education. Return migrants from the United States to Mexico are shorter than those who stay. Height is related to a number of indicators of adult health. Results support a role for selection in the Hispanic paradox and demonstrate the importance of education and childhood health as determinants of late-life health in both Mexico and the United States

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Wisconsin (P30 HD05876) and to the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin (P30 AG17266). 2 Context. We know precious little about adult health in developing countries in general and Latin America in particular. We know even less about the health conditions of elderly individuals. Since Mexico and many other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean region are and will continue to experience a very rapid process of aging, it is important to generate pertinent information and analyze it promptly to identify key features that could be used to formulate and design health policies. This is particularly useful in Mexico, and other countries of the region, which have embarked in sweeping reforms of the health sector. Objective. We aim to investigate the health profile of elderly Mexicans aged 50 and over. We are guided by two overarching concerns. First, does the health profile of elderly Mexicans reveal any special features, distinct from what one would expect from extant research on elderly individuals? Second, is there any evidence of relation

Coresidence with an Older Mother: The Adult Child\u27s Perspective

We estimate models of coresidence between adult children and their elderly unmarried mothers, using data from the National Survey of Families and Households. The models include controls for women’s wages, along with other variables representing competing demands on their time. Among married couples we explicitly represent the “competition” for residential space between a child’s mother and mother-in-law. The information necessary to identify the observations of interest— respondents with a living, unmarried older mother— is missing in most cases. We address this problem using a multiple imputation strategy. The results indicate that wages, income, and parental health are related to parent-child coresidence; among married couples, wives’ mothers are more likely to coreside than are husbands’ mothers, other things being equal

Evaluating Health and Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa: Minimally Invasive Collection of Plasma in the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH)

Background: The collection of biomarker-based indicators of adult health and fitness is an important addition to socioeconomic surveys since these indicators provide valuable insights into the biological functions, and the complex causal pathways between socioeconomic environments and health of adult individuals. Other than select Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), there are almost no population-based sources of biomarker-based indicators of adult health in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where most population-based biologic data are focused on HIV, other STDs, malaria, or nutritional status. While infectious diseases---such as HIV and malaria---attract the majority of research and NGOs attention in sub-Saharan Africa, there is an important need to understand the general determinants of adult health in SSA since the region will rapidly age in the next decades in ways that are significantly different from the aging patterns in other developing regions due to the AIDS epidemic, and chronic diseases will increasingly become relevant for understanding the health of sub-Saharan populations. Methods and Design: We document our protocol for the collection of biomarker-based health indicators as a pilot project within the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH), and we provide basic descriptive information about the study population and the collected biomarker-based indicators of adult health obtained from respondents in rural Malawi. LabAnywhere kits were used to obtain blood plasma from 980 adult men and women living in Balaka, the southern-most region in rural Malawi. The procedure allows for the non-invasive collection of blood plasma, but has not been been previously used in the context of a developing country. We collected biomarkers for inflammation and immunity, lipids, organ function, and metabolic processes. We specifically collected wide-range CRP, total cholesterol, LDL, HDL, total protein, urea, albumin, blood urea nitrogen, creatinine, random blood glucose and HbA1c assays. Overall, the mean values of the biomarkers are below the lower limits of clinical guidelines for adult populations in the U.S. and other developed countries, and only small proportions of the sample are above the upper limits of the normal clinical ranges as defined by U.S. standards. The correlationional patterns of the collected biomarkers are consistent with observations from developed countries, and the comparison with other low-income populations such as the Tsimane in Bolivia or the Yakuts in Siberia show remarkably similar age-specific patterns of the biomarkers despite differences in the mode of blood sampling. Discussion: The MLSFH biomarker sample makes a potentially important contribution to understanding the health of the adult populations in low income environments. The present study confirms that the collection of such biomarkers using the LabAnywhere system is feasible in rural sub-Saharan contexts: the refusal rate was very low in the MLSFH and following the procedures described above, only a small fraction of the biomarker samples could not be analyzed by LabAnywhere. The system therefore provides an attractive alternative to the collection of dried blood spots (DBS) and venous blood samples, providing a broader range of potential biomarkers than DBS and being logistically easier than the collection of venous blood

Coherent Assessments of Europe’s Marine Fishes Show Regional Divergence and Megafauna Loss

Europe has a long tradition of exploiting marine fishes and is promoting marine economic activity through its Blue Growth strategy. This increase in anthropogenic pressure, along with climate change, threatens the biodiversity of fishes and food security. Here, we examine the conservation status of 1,020 species of European marine fishes and identify factors that contribute to their extinction risk. Large fish species (greater than 1.5 m total length) are most at risk; half of these are threatened with extinction, predominantly sharks, rays and sturgeons. This analysis was based on the latest International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) European regional Red List of marine fishes, which was coherent with assessments of the status of fish stocks carried out independently by fisheries management agencies: no species classified by IUCN as threatened were considered sustainable by these agencies. A remarkable geographic divergence in stock status was also evident: in northern Europe, most stocks were not overfished, whereas in the Mediterranean Sea, almost all stocks were overfished. As Europe proceeds with its sustainable Blue Growth agenda, two main issues stand out as needing priority actions in relation to its marine fishes: the conservation of marine fish megafauna and the sustainability of Mediterranean fish stocks

The Accuracy of Self-Reported Anthropometry: Obesity among Older Mexicans. CDE Working Paper

(*) Authors ’ names are listed in strict alphabetical order2 Recent surveys of older adults include batteries of questions or modules on selfreported chronic conditions as well as on limited self-reported anthropometry. Experience with such surveys in developed countries shows that some self-reported conditions possess reasonably high validity. There is much less information on the accuracy of self-reported anthropometry. In developing countries these problems are virtually unexplored. This is a problematic gap in our knowledge since no less than ten different surveys are currently in the field eliciting information on these characteristics. In this paper we use a new data set to explore the accuracy of self-reported height and weight in a sample of older adults in Mexico. In this survey (MHAS), administered to a nationally representative sample of older adults fifty and over, actual measures of body weight and stature were collected for a sub-sample jointly with self-reported weight and height. Our analyses probe the following four issues: (a) the degree of concordance between self-report and objective measures; (b) individual determinants of discordance (c) biases in estimates of determinants of obesity when assessed from self-reported height and weight, (d) biases in equations assessing the relation between obesity evaluated through self-reported height and weight and self-reported diabetes. 3 1