Adolescent Cognitive Aptitudes and Later-in-Life Alzheimer Disease and Related Disorders.

Importance: Low early-life cognitive ability is a potential early marker of dementia risk in later life. Previous studies use only global measures of general intelligence and/or study this relationship in gender-specific samples. The contribution of early-life performance on specific cognitive abilities, such as language, reasoning, and visualization aptitudes, to indicating future dementia risk is unknown.

Investigating the Early Life Determinants of Type-II Diabetes Using a Project Talent-Medicare Linked Data-set.

The increasing prevalence of Type II Diabetes (T2D) presents a serious health and financial public crisis. Our study examines the hypothesis that adolescents' perceptions of economic insecurity, along with absolute and relative socioeconomic status (SES), can contribute to T2D prevalence later in life. Project Talent (PT) Survey data, collected on high school students in 1960, have been linked to Medicare records from 2012, presenting a unique opportunity to examine measures gathered in adolescence and T2D prevalence later-in-life among a large, national, and diverse sample (n=88,849).

The impact of retirement on health: quasi-experimental methods using administrative data.

Background: Is retirement good or bad for health? Disentangling causality is difficult. Much of the previous quasi-experimental research on the effect of health on retirement used self-reported health and relied upon discontinuities in public retirement incentives across Europe. The current study investigated the effect of retirement on health by exploiting discontinuities in private retirement incentives to test the effect of retirement on health using a quasi-experimental study design.

Linking individual medicare health claims data with work-life claims and other administrative data.

Background: Researchers investigating health outcomes for populations over age 65 can utilize Medicare claims data, but these data include no direct information about individuals' health prior to age 65 and are not typically linkable to files containing data on exposures and behaviors during their worklives. The current paper is a proof-of-concept, of merging employers' administrative data and private, employment-based health claims with Medicare data. Characteristics of the linked data, including sensitivity and specificity, are evaluated with an eye toward potential uses of such linked data.

Early-Life State-of-Residence Characteristics and Later Life Hypertension, Diabetes, and Ischemic Heart Disease.

Objectives: We examined how state characteristics in early life are associated with individual chronic disease later in life.

Methods: We assessed early-life state of residence using the first 3 digits of social security numbers from blue- and white-collar workers from a US manufacturing company. Longitudinal data were available from 1997 to 2012, with 305 936 person-years of observation.