Early life socioeconomic conditions in rural areas and old-age mortality in twentieth-century Quebec

Gagnon, Alain; Bohnert, Nora

doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.06.007

Cited by 19 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 35 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Men whose fathers were farmers had significantly lower mortality in adulthood. Gagnon and Bohnert (2012) and Preston et al (1998) also found evidence for lower mortality in adulthood among Canadian and African-American men born on farms. Similar to our results they did not find such an effect for women.…”

Section: Menmentioning

confidence: 86%

Early-life conditions and adult mortality decline in Dutch cohorts born 1812–1921

Schellekens

Poppel

2016

Population Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: Menmentioning

confidence: 86%

Early-life conditions and adult mortality decline in Dutch cohorts born 1812–1921

Schellekens

Poppel

2016

Population Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Additional analyses should be done using a better indicator of socio-economic status. Perhaps the number of acres owned by the household head, as proxy for the socio-economic standing, presuming that a higher number of acres owned implied a higher socio-economic status, could be a more adequate measure (Gagnon and Bohnert 2012;Baskerville 2001). One would think that the birth order effect may vanish in families with more valuable landholdings.…”

Section: Birth Order and Longevitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Maternal age, birth order and other early-life factors: a family-level approach to exploring exceptional survival

Jarry

Gagnon²,

Bourbeau³

2014

Populationyearbook

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The literature provides increasing empirical support for the idea that early-life experiences can greatly shape someone's future health and longevity. Besides shared early-life conditions, within-family variation in maternal age at time of childbirth and birth order have been found to be related to later-life survival. In this study, we examine whether there is a persisting effect of maternal age and birth order on survival to age 104 when both variables are considered and adjusted for season of birth and birth spacing. To address potential confounding by unmeasured family-level factors, we apply a case-sibling control analysis. Using data on 273 centenarians born in Quebec in the 1890-1900 period and their siblings, we show that children born to mothers over age 40 are less likely to reach age 104 while third-and fourthborn children are more likely to make this landmark. When examining the effect of maternal age in combination with the effect of birth order, we obtain higher estimates of both maternal age effects and birth order effects, indicating that the measured influence of one is suppressed when the other is not accounted for. We argue that being born early in the sibling row may provide a biological advantage related in part to the quality of the female reproductive system, but this effect may be counterbalanced by the precariousness of the family as a socio-economic unit at the earliest stages of its cycle. No mediation of these effects is seen when including birth spacing and season of birth. However, we find that birth order differences in longevity are most prominent among siblings born to older mothers and in families where the father was a farmer. We discuss other possible social and historical pathways through which maternal age, birth order and season of birth may operate to mould the offspring's longevity.

show abstract

“…Many previous studies that examine the way in which number of siblings is related to health or mortality have focused on outcomes that can be observed among infants and small children (Glick et al 2007;Baez 2008;Henderson et al 2008;Rosenzweig and Zhang 2009;Millimet and Wang 2011), and therefore do not provide evidence on the long-term effects of growing up in a large family. Moreover, previous studies have almost exclusively used data from lowor middle-income countries, or historical populations (Hart and Smith 2003;Smith et al 2009;Hatton and Martin 2010;Gagnon and Bohnert 2012). While this body of research has provided a number of interesting insights, the results of these studies must be interpreted in the light of their contexts of harsh economic conditions and limited access to state support.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of number of siblings on adult mortality: Evidence from Swedish registers for cohorts born between 1938 and 1972

2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Demographic research has paid much attention to the impact of childhood conditions on adult mortality. We focus on one of the key aspects of early life conditions, sibling group size, and examine the causal effect of growing up in a large family on mortality. While previous studies have focused on low- or middle-income countries, we examine whether growing up in a large family is a disadvantage in Sweden, a context where most parents have adequate resources, which are complemented by a generous welfare state. We used Swedish register data and frailty models, examining all-cause and cause-specific mortality between the ages of 40 and 74 for the 1938-72 cohorts, and also a quasi-experimental approach that exploited multiple births as a source of exogenous variation in the number of siblings. Overall our results do not indicate that growing up in a large family has a detrimental effect on longevity in Sweden.

show abstract

Early life socioeconomic conditions in rural areas and old-age mortality in twentieth-century Quebec

Cited by 19 publications

References 35 publications

Early-life conditions and adult mortality decline in Dutch cohorts born 1812–1921

Early-life conditions and adult mortality decline in Dutch cohorts born 1812–1921

Maternal age, birth order and other early-life factors: a family-level approach to exploring exceptional survival

The effect of number of siblings on adult mortality: Evidence from Swedish registers for cohorts born between 1938 and 1972

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About