Background: Periodontal disease (PD) is a prevalent, preventable and treatable oral infection associated with substantial morbidity globally. There is little information from population-representative cohort studies about the sociodemographic, educational and other early life factors that stratify PD risk.
Methods: We used data from the U.
Objective: The 1940 Census is a valuable resource for understanding various aspects of historical populations in the United States. Recently, the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP) integrated 1940 Census data into its extensive dataset, providing researchers with an opportunity to explore new avenues of life course investigation. We leverage the newly-introduced measures of childhood residential environment and evaluate their potential predictive utility in older adult cognitive functioning net of childhood and adulthood characteristics known to be key risk factors for poor cognition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Smoking is a leading cause of premature death across contemporary developed nations, but few longitudinal individual-level studies have examined the long-term health consequences of exposure to smoking.
Objective: We examine the effect of fetal and infant exposure to exogenous variation in smoking, brought about by state-level cigarette taxation, on adulthood and old-age mortality (ages 55-73) among cohorts of boys born in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.
Methods: We use state-of-the-art methods of record linkage to match 1930 and 1940 US full-count census records to death records, identifying early life exposure to the implementation of state-level cigarette taxes through contemporary sources.
Objective: To assess sudden unexpected infant death (SUID) investigations for structural inequities by race/ethnicity and geography.
Methods: The SUID Case Registry compiles data on death investigations. We analyzed cases from 2015 to 2018 (N = 3847) to examine likelihood of an incomplete death investigation, defined as missing autopsy, missing scene investigation, or missing detailed information about where and how the body was found.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
November 2023
Recent research concludes that professional American football players (hereafter, "football players") live longer than American men in general, despite experiencing higher rates of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and cardiovascular disease (CVD). This suggests that the longevity-enhancing benefits of playing football (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDue to structural racism and pathways between racism and health, Black and Native American people die at younger ages than white people. This means that those groups are likely to experience deaths of family members at younger ages. Evidence is mixed about whether family deaths affect educational attainment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildhood malnutrition and its later life effects were important concerns in European and North American social policy in the early twentieth century. However, there have been few studies of the long-term socioeconomic consequences of malnutrition in childhood. We use a unique longitudinal dataset to provide credible causal estimates of the effects of childhood nutrition on early-adult educational and employment outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPopul Res Policy Rev
April 2023
Unlabelled: For a quarter of a century researchers have been documenting and trying to explain trends in Americans' vocabulary knowledge using data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and its WORDSUM test. Trends in Americans' vocabulary knowledge have important practical implications-for example, for educational policy and practice-and speak to the American workforce's competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. We contribute to this debate by analyzing 1978-2018 GSS data using an improved analytical approach that is consistent with theoretical notions of cohort effects and that permits simultaneously estimating inter-cohort average differences and intra-cohort life-course changes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examine the socioeconomic consequences of discrimination against people of Southern origins during the U.S. Great Migration of the first half of the 20 century.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Flint, Michigan water crisis renewed concern about lead toxicity in drinking water. While lead in drinking water has been shown to negatively affect cognition among children, much less is known about its long-term consequences for late-life cognition. Using a nationally representative sample of U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRacism is embedded in society, and higher education is an important structure for patterning economic and health outcomes. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were founded on antiracism while predominantly White institutions (PWIs) were often founded on white supremacy. This contrast provides an opportunity to study the association between structural racism and health among Black Americans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is considerable evidence that the act of participating in a survey can alter participants' attitudes, behaviors, and other outcomes in meaningful ways. Considering findings that this form of panel conditioning also impacts health behaviors and outcomes, we investigated the effect of participating in an intensive half-century-long cohort study on participants' longevity. To do so, we used data from a 1957 survey of more than 33,000 Wisconsin high school seniors linked to mortality records.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe economic characteristics of one's childhood neighborhood have been found to determine long-term well-being. Policies enacted during childhood may change neighborhood trajectories and thus impact long-term outcomes for children. We use individual-level data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to examine the enduring consequences of childhood exposure to local-area New Deal emergency employment work-relief activity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Retrospective measures of childhood socioeconomic status (SES) in cohort studies of aging that first observe people late in life-such as the Health and Retirement Study (HRS)-are widely used. However, their measurement validity and reliability are unknown. We assess the reliability and validity of the HRS's retrospective measures of parental education and childhood family finances.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAssess the association of BMI and BMI change with mortality. Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) on participants born mainly in 1939 (=4922), we investigated the associations between various measures of BMI across the life course (age 54 BMI; age 65 BMI; age 72 BMI; lifetime maximum BMI; BMI change between ages 54 and 65; BMI change between ages 65 and 72) and mortality. We also assessed whether these associations are mediated by late life health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Lead exposure negatively affects cognitive functioning among children. However, there is limited evidence about whether exposure to lead in early life impairs later life cognitive functioning.
Methods: Participants in the prospective Wisconsin Longitudinal Study cohort (N = 8583) were linked to the 1940 Census, which was taken when they were young children.
We ask whether patterns of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic stratification in educational attainment are amplified or attenuated when we take a longer view of educational careers. We propose a model of to understand how educational inequalities evolve over the life course. Distinct from cumulative advantage, staged advantage asserts that inequalities in education ebb and flow over the life course as the population at risk of making each educational transition changes along with the constraints they confront in seeking more education.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScience, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) jobs have grown in importance in the labor market in recent decades, and they are widely seen as the jobs of the future. Using data from the U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research based on the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study (HRS) has argued that the prevalence of cognitive impairment has declined in recent years in the United States. A recent article published in by Hale et al., however, suggests this finding is biased by unmeasured panel conditioning (improvement in cognitive scores resulting from repeat assessment).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvidence of a strong negative correlation between adolescent academic performance and mortality points to the importance of not only cognitive, but also non-cognitive, skills in predicting survival. We integrated two bodies of research to evaluate expectations regarding the role of educational attainment and trajectories of employment and marriage experience in mediating relationships between high school class rank and longevity. In particular, we used data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study ( = 9,232) to fit parametric mortality models from age 55 to age 77.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhat dimensions of education matter for people's chances of surviving young adulthood? Do cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, course taking patterns, and school social contexts matter for young adult mortality, even net of educational attainment? We analyze data from High School & Beyond-a nationally representative cohort of ~25,000 high school students first interviewed in 1980. Many dimensions of education are associated with young adult mortality, and high school students' math course taking retain their associations with mortality net of educational attainment. Our work draws on theories and measures from sociological and educational research and enriches public health, economic, and demographic research on educational gradients in mortality that has almost exclusively relied on ideas of human capital accumulation and measures of degree attainment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDoes education change people's lives in a way that delays mortality? Or is education primarily a proxy for unobserved endowments that promote longevity? Most scholars conclude that the former is true, but recent evidence based on Danish twin data calls this conclusion into question. Unfortunately, these potentially field-changing findings-that obtaining additional schooling has no independent effect on survival net of other hard-to-observe characteristics-have not yet been subject to replication outside Scandinavia. In this article, we produce the first U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPast research finds that the effect of socioeconomic origin on the probability of making educational transitions decreases over the educational career from primary to graduate school. Some have argued that this pattern of waning is the result of selective attrition, since those of modest social origins who make a given transition may have exceptional cognitive or noncognitive skills while more advantaged individuals may rely less heavily on these skills to continue their education. We study a sample of American 10th graders from 1980 to assess how much the pattern of waning effects is due to selective attrition along noncognitive skills for this cohort.
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