Cumulative social class and mortality from various causes of adult men

Abstract

Study objective: It is possible that circumstances over the lifecourse contribute to social inequalities in mortality in adulthood. The aim of this study is to assess the cumulative effect of social class at childhood and adulthood on mortality from various causes of death in young adult men. Design: The data consist of census records for all Finnish men born in 1956-60 (112 735 persons and 895 001 person years), and death records (1834 deaths) by cause of death for 1991-98. Main results: Mortality from each cause of death increased from the stable non-manual group to mobile groups, and further to the stable manual group. However, mortality in the downwardly mobile group was 150% higher than in the upwardly mobile group. Furthermore, analyses show that mortality was mainly related to current adult social class, though, within each adult social class men with a manual parental background showed slightly increased mortality from cardiovascular disease and from alcohol related causes. Conclusions: In these data the effects of adult social class were stronger than childhood class for all causes of death. It is more useful to differentiate between childhood and adulthood effects than to use a combined measure of social class to assess the contribution of social class at different stages of life on mortality.

Socioprofessional trajectories and mortality in France, 1976–2002: a longitudinal follow-up of administrative data

“…This association was stronger for cardiovascular and cancer mortality in men but was significant only for all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in women. This is consistent with the results of previous studies 15 16 33 37. The large mortality risk of those who stay longer in the low occupational categories can be explained by exposure to poor working conditions and by the fact that the least skilled are less likely to move upward.…”

Cumulative life course and adult socioeconomic status and markers of inflammation in adulthood

“…Recent research has focused on the influence of life-course SES on CVD8 9: various study designs have been utilised to examine the impact of SES throughout the life course on adult cardiovascular health and several interrelated theories have been posited 10 – 13. Results support a cumulative model of life-course risk, wherein the accumulation of adverse psychosocial and physiological exposures across the life course is associated with increased CVD 9 14 – 18…”

Socio-economic position over the life course and all-cause, and circulatory diseases mortality at age 50–87 years: results from a Swedish birth cohort

“…The males and females in this study were born from 1915 to 1929 in Uppsala and followed for mortality from age 50-65 onwards, using prospectively collected SEP data. By contrast most previous studies have focused on younger cohorts [4,18,21,[23][24][25][26], were restricted to males [1,[25][26][27]; usually used only two time points for SEP measurement [1, 4, 18-19, 22-23, 26]; and often used retrospective (recalled) SEP at birth or lacked birth SEP altogether [1,4,[17][18][19][25][26]. Comparison with other studies is further hindered as their analyses have not been explicitly framed in terms of life course models, but instead have implicitly tested sensitive period models by mutually adjusting for SEP at the various time points.…”