Background: In recent decades, we have observed rising wealth inequality while the pace of growth of life expectancy has slowed in many Western welfare democracies. There is scarce evidence, however, on links between wealth and mortality. The main methodological limitation in this area of scholarship is its inability to account for individuals' unobserved heterogeneity, such as personality and genetic factors, which could potentially affect both their wealth level and survival probabilities. This study aims to explore how wealth is linked to mortality risk in late-middle age, providing insights into the broader implications of socioeconomic status on health outcomes.
Methods: In this study, we use high-quality register data on wealth and mortality for the entire population of Norway, one of the world's most advanced welfare states with a low income inequality level but a highly uneven distribution of wealth. We address some of the main methodological constraints of the previous research by exploring if wealth at the age of 37-38 predicts mortality up to age 62. The research design employed mitigates the problem of unobserved heterogeneity by using sibling and twin fixed-effects models.
Findings: Both Kaplan-Meier survival analyses and the Cox proportional hazard regression results suggest that wealth is an important predictor of mortality even after individuals' observed and unobserved characteristics are accounted for with hazard ratios of 2.39 [95% confidence interval, CI 2.02, 2.83] among men and 1.74 [95% CI 1.39, 2.16] among women for the inverted cumulative density rank coefficients. The most disadvantaged groups are non-partnered men and women at the lower end of wealth distribution. Twin analyses align with the findings for the general population, indicating that wealth's effect on mortality is not confounded by genetic or shared family background factors.
Interpretation: Our findings suggest that wealth is an important predictor of mortality, even in an advanced welfare state with comprehensive healthcare provisions, highlighting the need to address inequalities in wealth distribution to improve population health outcomes.
Funding: The Research Council of Norway.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lanepe.2024.101113 | DOI Listing |
J Biomed Inform
January 2025
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Ave, Boston, 02115, MA, USA; VA Boston Healthcare System, 150 S Huntington Ave, Boston, 02130, MA, USA. Electronic address:
Objective: Electronic health record (EHR) systems contain a wealth of clinical data stored as both codified data and free-text narrative notes (NLP). The complexity of EHR presents challenges in feature representation, information extraction, and uncertainty quantification. To address these challenges, we proposed an efficient Aggregated naRrative Codified Health (ARCH) records analysis to generate a large-scale knowledge graph (KG) for a comprehensive set of EHR codified and narrative features.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFViruses
January 2025
Department of Avian and Rabbit Medicine, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Zagazig University, Zagazig 44511, Egypt.
The present study aims to better understand the nature of currently circulating GPV strains and their pathological impact on the immune system during natural outbreaks among different duck breeds in Egypt. For this purpose, 99 ducks (25 flocks) of different breeds, aged 14-75 days, were clinically examined, and 75 tissue pools from the thymus, bursa of Fabricius, and spleen were submitted for virus detection and identification. Clinical and postmortem findings were suggestive of GPV infection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNutrients
January 2025
Health Research Institute, Faculty of Health, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT 2617, Australia.
Introduction: Undernutrition in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remains a leading public health challenge. It accounts for one-third of the under-five mortality rate in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This study applied the composite index of anthropometric failure (CIAF) to assess the prevalence of various standalone and coexisting forms of undernutrition and identify associated risk factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNutrients
January 2025
Cambridge Centre for Sport and Exercise Sciences (CCSES), Faculty of Science and Engineering, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge CB1 1PT, UK.
Background/objectives: There is current scientific interest pertaining to the therapeutic effects of olive-derived polyphenols (ODPs), in particular their associated anti-inflammatory properties, following the wealth of research surrounding the physiological impact of the Mediterranean Diet (MD). Despite this association, the majority of the current literature investigates ODPs in conjunction with metabolic diseases. There is limited research focusing on ODPs and acute inflammation following exercise, regardless of the knowledge surrounding the elevated inflammatory response during this time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicroorganisms
December 2024
Department of Ichthyology and Aquatic Environment, School of Agricultural Sciences, University of Thessaly, 384 46 Volos, Greece.
The introduction of the holobiont concept has triggered scientific interest in depicting the structural and functional diversity of animal microbial symbionts, which has resulted in an unprecedented wealth of such cross-domain biological associations. The steadfast technological progress in nucleic acid-based approaches would cause one to expect that scientific works on the microbial symbionts of animals would be balanced at least for the farmed animals of human interest. For some animals, such as ruminants and a few farmed fish species of financial significance, the scientific wealth of the microbial worlds they host is immense and ever growing.
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