Alex Burdorf

Frank J van Lenthe

Mauricio Avendano

Simone Croezen

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Comparing health outcomes in SHARE with other European surveys

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SPEAKER PRESENTATION Open Access
Comparing health outcomes in SHARE with other
European surveys
Simone Croezen1*, Mauricio Avendano1,2, Alex Burdorf1, Frank J van Lenthe1
From European Workshop on Health and Disability Surveillance in Ageing Populations (EUWAP)
Berlin, Germany. 22-23 November 2012
In the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe
(SHARE) (http://www.share-project.org), health measures
were constructed based on a careful consultation process
of health experts and previous health surveys. However,
there have been limited efforts to examine the comparabil-
ity of health data in SHARE. Therefore, we aim to com-
pare self-reports of health based on incidence and
prevalence of health outcomes in SHARE to estimates
from parallel national and trans-national health surveys.
Prevalence of health outcomes in SHARE measured at
baseline (2004/2005) were compared to prevalence esti-
mates from the European Health Interview Survey (EHIS)
(2006-2009), national Health Interview Surveys (HIS)
(1997-2003), the European Social Survey (ESS) (2004/
2005), the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions
(EU-SILC) (2005) and the disability ad hoc module added
to the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS-dis-
ability) (2002). Components of each of these surveys pro-
vide an element of comparison for a particular health
dimension in SHARE. Across countries, agreement
between surveys was described for self-perceived health,
long-standing illness, global activity limitations, diabetes,
hypertension, asthma, lung diseases, depression and over-
weight by age group, gender and educational level.
First results show substantial variation in the compar-
ability of health prevalence assessed by SHARE with other
health surveys, depending on the health indicator of inter-
est. For instance, a good agreement with SHARE was
found for self-reported diagnosed diseases assessed by
EHIS and for overweight based on self-reported weight
and height by EHIS and HIS. On the other hand, for self-
perceived health, the agreement between SHARE and
other surveys was poor. Furthermore, agreement varied
across countries, making country-specific comparisons
between surveys less reliable. Lack of agreement between
surveys is studied in more detail concerning systematic
differences in survey design, sampling strategies, responses
and assessment modes. Investigating time trends will eval-
uate whether differences in prevalence of health indicators
between surveys will also affect agreement among trends
over time in prevalence of health measures across age,
gender and education. These additional analyses will com-
plete this first assessment of the quality of SHARE data on
health. Besides, this research will highlight the overlap and
complementarity between SHARE and other national and
trans-national health surveys. By recognising health mea-
sures that could be harmonised between surveys and mea-
sures that are more exclusive, we could exploit the
opportunities offered by having multiple measures of
health in different surveys.
Authors’ details
1Department of Public Health, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. 2LSE
Health, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.
Published: 23 August 2013
doi:10.1186/1753-6561-7-S4-S2
Cite this article as: Croezen et al.: Comparing health outcomes in SHARE
with other European surveys. BMC Proceedings 2013 7(Suppl 4):S2.
* Correspondence: s.croezen@erasmusmc.nl
1Department of Public Health, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Croezen et al. BMC Proceedings 2013, 7(Suppl 4):S2
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1753-6561/7/S4/S2
© 2013 Croezen et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


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Comparing health outcomes in SHARE with other European surveys

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