141st APHA Annual Meeting

In This section

289578
Comparative cohort trends of black-white disparity among obese and non-obese older adults

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Shih-Fan Lin, DrPH , Center for Health Equity Research and Policy, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA
Audrey Beck, PhD , Center for Health Equity Research and Policy, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA
Brian Finch, PhD , Economics, Sociology and Statistics, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA
Late-life disabilities such as ADL and IADL limitations are associated with elevated mortality and health risks. These risks are exacerbated for obese individuals as they tend to have higher rate of disability than non-obese individuals. As newer cohorts of older adults may experience longer duration of obesity than earlier cohorts due to improved medical technology, we expect that recent obese cohorts would show higher rate of disability than earlier cohorts. Further, although we have examined the age-period-cohort trends of black-white disparities in ADL and IADL disabilities, the disparity trends by obesity status have not yet been explored. Using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and age-period-cohort models, our preliminary results showed that ADL and IADL disabilities for individuals aged 70 and older declined across earlier cohorts; however, the trends showed a small uptick from the 1925 cohort for ADL disability and from the 1935 cohort for IADL disability. The trends of black-white disparity for ADL and IADL disabilities were quite flat across the cohorts for obese individuals; whereas, ADL and IADL disparities generally declined for non-obese individuals. We also found that obese individuals tend to have lower ADL and IADL disparities than non-obese individuals which suggests that obesity might have attenuated the black-white disparities in disability. Finally, we compared our NHANES results to NHIS dataset using the same statistical model for robustness check and found similar black-white disparity trends except that obese individuals tend to show slightly declining ADL and IADL disparities in the NHIS dataset.

Learning Areas:
Epidemiology

Learning Objectives:
Explain cohort trends (1900-1940) of ADL and IADL disabilities by obesity status. Distinguish cohort trends (1900-1940) of ADL and IADL black-white disparities among obese and non-obese individuals.

Keywords: Disability, Aging

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the main author who performed the statistical analyses and interpreted the results. I also published a similar article in the American Journal of Public Health.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.