How is mortality affected by money, marriage, and stress?

Abstract

It is believed that the length of a person's life depends on a mixture of economic and social factors. Yet the relative importance of these is still debated. We provide recent British evidence that marriage has a strong positive effect on longevity. Economics matters less. After controlling for health at the start of the 1990s, we cannot find reliable evidence that income affects the probability of death in the subsequent decade. Although marriage keeps people alive, it does not appear to work through a reduction of stress levels. Greater levels of psychological distress (as measured by General Health Questionnaire stress scores) cannot explain why unmarried people die younger. For women, however, we do find that mental strain is dangerous. High GHQ stress scores help to predict the probability of an early death.

Marital status of people aged 75 and over in nine EU countries in the period 2000–2030

“…While this might seem to suggest that women will benefit from these trends, there are also potential disadvantages to being an older married woman, and the numbers of both men and women who are married will increase by almost identical numbers, just over 5 million each. A number of investigations of differentials in health, rather than mortality, have found that at older ages never-married women have as good or better health than their married counterparts (Goldman et al 1995;Murphy et al 1997;Grundy and Sloggett 2003;Gardner and Oswald 2004). Thus the number of older women who will have a spouse in need of care will also increase and this can also be damaging for the health of the elderly spouse (Vitaliano et al 2003).…”

Mortality and immortality: The Nobel Prize as an experiment into the effect of status upon longevity

“…Holding constant initial health, and using the British Household Panel Survey, Gardner and Oswald (2004) find no significant effect from income on to later mortality risk. Gravelle and Sutton (2006) and Miller and Paxson (2006) do not uncover persuasive evidence of health effects from relative income.…”

Mortality, lifestyle and socio-economic status

“…The length of the follow-up period, nineteen years, and the checks on the official registers of deaths ensure the reliability of mortality data in HALS. A recent paper by Gardner and Oswald (2004), using longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to study the influence of socio-economic dynamics on longevity, suffers the limitation of a shorter follow-up period (only ten years) and the absence of a double check on the official register.…”