Cumulative Disadvantages and Older Adult's Health from Life Stressful Events and Gender Perspectives

Background/Purpose: Research on cumulative disadvantages on later life health are increasing. Most of existing studies focused on childhood adversity and/or adulthood disadvantages in examining older adult’s health. The current study contributes to a life course-health literature by addressing two gaps: First, we focus on the possible role of stressful life events. Stressful life events are known to predict changes in physical and mental health status, but rare study examined the moderating role of life events in the pathway linking cumulative disadvantages and health in old age. Second, despite the well-established gender differences in health over the life course, knowledge on the gendered pattern of cumulative disadvantages-later year health association is extremely limited. In this study, we examined the independent effect of stressful life events, then looked to what extent gender moderated the effect of life events on older adult’s health over the life course.

Method: Data came from the 2012 wave of Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The sample was restricted to older adults 51 and older, and those who participated in Psycho-social questionnaire in 2012 (N=4237). Retrospective childhood variables and adulthood health and socio-economic status variables were used to construct cumulative disadvantages over the life course. For life stressful events, three composite indicators of interpersonal stress, financial stress, and health stress related life events were used. We used multiple regressions in the hierarchical models to examine the role of life stressful events independent of cumulative disadvantages on self-rated health in old age. Further, we investigated to what extent gender moderated the cumulative disadvantages-health association.  

Results: Older adults with more cumulative disadvantages had significantly poorer health independently (Coef= -0.25, p< 0.000). The association between the life events and health varied by the types of the life events. Health-related life events such as experiencing life-threatening illness of self or close relatives were significantly related with current poorer health status (Coef= -0.20, p< 0.000). Having experienced financial stress due to loss of job was also the main effect on poorer health (Coef= -0.14, p< 0.05). Interestingly, older women were more likely to have poorer health when they experienced the interpersonal stress related life events (Coef= -0.15, p< 0.01) such as the death of child and addiction of drugs or alcohol of spouse, partner, or child, but no relations were found among older men. 

Conclusions/Implications: Our study is the first comprehensive empirical study that incorporated life stressful events and gender perspective in life course research on later year health. The findings on gender differential pattern of life stress on health provide important background knowledge for designing policy and intervention programs in older adult’s health. As an explorative attempt, this study used cross-sectional data. Future continued research is important to test a casual gendered pathway to later year health over the life course.