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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Judy C. Xu, Department of Health Policy & Management, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, 624 N.Broadway P.O. Box 688, Balrimore, MD 21205, 410-235-3206, juxu@jhsph.edu and Daniel Polsky, Division of General Internal Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Blockley Hall, Rm. 1212, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Objective: To investigate self-rated health patterns of change over time for older adults with a new diagnosis of selected chronic and acute conditions, taking into account gender differences.
Method: We use responses (age 51-67) from four waves of the Health and Retirement Survey. Ordinary least squares (OLS) and ordered probit regression models are used to predict health status of both genders in a longitudinal model. The dependent variable is self-reported health status on a 5-point scale (from 1=poor and 5=excellent). The key independent variables are new occurrences of seven acute or chronic health conditions. To estimate whether health status persists after a new condition occurs, we interact the length of time since the condition occurred with the new condition indicator variable. We control for baseline health status and socio-economic variables.
Results: The OLS shows that new occurrences of each of the seven conditions reduce health status with cancer having the strongest negative impact on both males (-0.71) and females (-0.79) (P<0.01). Psychiatric problems have a larger effect on females’ health (-0.54) than on males (-0.30) (P<0.04). Moreover, there are significant improvements of cancer and psychiatric problems in subsequent self-rated health status for females (0.09, 0.09), but smaller improvements for males (0.03, 0.00). The results of the ordered probit were comparable.
Conclusions: Self-rated health status shows remarkable face validity with both acute and chronic conditions showing large initial declines in self-reported health status in both genders. However, there are significant differences of subsequent improvements for psychiatric problems between genders.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Gender, Aging
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.