Early-Life Circumstances, Health Behavior Profiles, and Later-Life Health in Great Britain

[Cross-cultural adaptation and evidence of psychometric validity of the Family Health Scale for Brazilian Portuguese]

This study aimed to translate and cross-culturally adapt the Family Health Scale into Brazilian Portuguese and analyze evidence of its psychometric validity. The 32 items on family health were cross-culturally adapted, using the content validity index to calculate semantic, idiomatic, cultural, and conceptual characteristics of the scale and its items. A pre-test to identify evidence of validity was applied to 40 families. At another time, the instrument was applied to 354 families in a Brazilian northeastern city. The index of agreement between the raters ranged from 0.84 for the scale items to 0.98 for the total scale, according to Kendall's coefficient. According to Cronbach's alpha, evidence of psychometric validity is adequate. Most families had a moderate degree of health, according to the scale. Therefore, the Brazilian version of the Family Health Scale showed conceptual, semantic, cultural, and operational equivalence with the original items, along with satisfactory psychometric properties for use among the Brazilian population with effectiveness and safety.

The contribution of parity to ethnic differences in mothers' body mass index in the Netherlands: A Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition approach

Women of Turkish and Moroccan origin in the Netherlands are relatively likely to have an unhealthy bodyweight. This study sheds light on how ethnic differences in parity, i.e., the number of times a female carried pregnancies to a viable gestational age, contribute to body mass index (BMI) differences between Turkish-born and Moroccan-born mothers aged 35 + and their native Dutch counterparts. We applied a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition approach to pooled data from four migrant surveys based on national probability samples (n = 2,532). Unlike conventional mediation analyses, the Blinder-Oaxaca approach recognizes that the association between parity and bodyweight may vary across different groups. Our results indicated that Turkish-born and Moroccan-born mothers in the Netherlands had more children and a higher BMI than native Dutch mothers. Regression analyses moreover showed that the parity-BMI gradient was steeper for Turkish-born mothers than for native Dutch mothers. Decomposition using the Blinder-Oaxaca approach indicated that the higher number of children of Turkish-born and Moroccan-born mothers compared to native Dutch mothers contributed substantially to the higher mean BMI in the former groups. The steeper parity-BMI gradient in Turkish-born mothers further amplified the contribution of parity to the higher mean BMI of Turkish-born mothers as compared to native Dutch mothers. Future research is needed to assess to which extent the steep parity-BMI gradient in Turkish-born mothers can be explained by relatively strong barriers to a healthy lifestyle that Turkish-born mothers of a larger number of children may face due to a relatively strongly gendered division of household and childrearing tasks.

Longitudinal health behaviour patterns among adults aged ≥50 years in China and their associations with trajectories of depressive symptoms

OBJECTIVES

Against the background of the growing recognition of the need for a holistic perspective on health behaviour, we aim to identify longitudinal patterns of multiple health behaviours, and to assess associations of such patterns with depressive symptoms among older people in China.

METHODS

Using three waves of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study data (n = 8439), we performed latent class growth analyses (LCGAs) to identify longitudinal patterns of multiple health behaviours. Random-effects models were estimated to assess associations between health behaviour patterns and depressive symptoms.

RESULTS

The best fitting LCGA model had seven classes: (1) connected active non-smokers (average posterior probability: 21.8%), (2) isolated active non-smokers (24.7%), (3) isolated inactive non-smokers (17.0%), (4) isolated active smokers (14.5%), (5) connected active smokers (12.2%), (6) increasingly connected and active non-smokers (5.4%), and (7) moderately connected inactive smokers (4.4%). Depressive symptoms were highest in the four classes with lower probabilities of social participation across waves. No evidence was found of change over time in depressive symptomatology gaps between people with different health behaviour trajectories.

CONCLUSION

Health behaviour patterns characterized by consistently low social participation were associated with raised depressive symptomatology, suggesting that focusing on social participation may benefit later-life mental health promotion strategies.

Long-Term Effects of Local-Area New Deal Work Relief in Childhood on Educational, Economic, and Health Outcomes Over the Life Course: Evidence From the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study

The 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. Our outcomes include adolescent cognition, educational attainment, midlife income, health behaviors, late-life cognition, and mortality. We find that children (ages 0-3) living in neighborhoods with moderate work-relief activity in 1940 had higher adolescent IQ scores, had higher class rank, and were more likely to obtain at least a bachelor's degree. We find enduring benefits for midlife income and late-life cognition for males who grew up in areas with a moderate amount of work relief. We find mixed results for males who grew up in the most disadvantaged areas with the highest levels of work-relief activity. These children had similar educational outcomes as those in the most advantaged districts with the lowest work-relief activity but had higher adult smoking rates. Our findings provide some of the first evidence of the long-term consequences of New Deal policies on children's long-term life course outcomes.

Obesity-Related Health Lifestyles of Late-Middle Age Black Americans: The Jackson Heart Study

INTRODUCTION

This article examines the obesity-related health lifestyle practices of a late-middle age cohort of socioeconomically diverse Black Americans. Black people have the highest prevalence of obesity of any racial group in the U.S. Consequently, the obesity-related health lifestyles of this population is an important topic of investigation, including those in late-middle age for whom there is little data.

METHODS

This study employs latent class analysis (LCA) and multinomial logit models to investigate dietary habits, levels of exercise, alcohol use, and smoking. The analysis sample is from the first examination of the Jackson Heart Study (2000‒2004) analyzed in 2021 using LCA. The sample consists of 739 Black men and 1,351 women between the ages of 50 and 64 years.

RESULTS

Three classes of lifestyles were found for both genders: healthy diet, unhealthy diet, and unhealthy smokers. For women only, a most healthy lifestyle was added. Major findings are the low levels of physical activity, a clear socioeconomic pattern in healthy lifestyles among Black men and women, and the association of diagnoses of diabetes and cardiovascular disease with healthier lifestyle practices among Black men but not among women.

CONCLUSIONS

Obesity-related health lifestyles among late-middle aged Black Americans generally do not converge toward a healthier norm with impending old age. An exception is men who have been diagnosed as having diabetes or heart disease. Otherwise, healthy and unhealthy lifestyle practices remain aligned by social class during this period of the life course.

The illness perception and health promotion behaviour of young and middle-aged patients with hyperuricaemia: A qualitative study

AIM

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the health-promoting behaviours of patients with hyperuricaemia and influencing factors.

DESIGN

A descriptive qualitative design was used to gain insight into the personal experience of health promotion behaviour in patients with hyperuricaemia.

METHODS

Sixteen patients were sampled in face-to-face interviews with maximum variation, and the data were transcribed verbatim. The data analysis was based on the phrases of thematic analysis outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006).

RESULTS

Four main themes were identified in the data: (a) Perception of disease; (b) Motivation to change health-promoting behaviour; (c) Strategies for health-promoting behaviour; and (d) Encounter obstacles to change health-promoting behaviour.

The causal effect of number of children on later-life overweight and obesity in parous women. An instrumental variable study

Many older women in Europe are overweight or obese. One of the factors linked to overweight and obesity among older women is childbearing. However, results of observational studies on the association between women’s number of children and excess weight should be interpreted with caution, because they may be prone to bias due to residual confounders or reverse causation. We use data of women aged 50 and older with at least two births from seven waves the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (n = 113,932) collected between 2004 and 2020. We adopt an instrumental variable approach that exploits the well-established preference for mixed-sex offspring to estimate the causal effect of number of children on older parous women’s body mass index (BMI) and their risk of overweight (BMI >= 25 kg/m2) and obesity (BMI >= 30 kg/m2). The instrumental variable models provided evidence for a causal positive effect of having 3 + children as opposed to 2 children on mothers’ body mass index, overweight (BMI >= 25 kg/m2) risk and obesity (BMI >= 30 kg/m2) risk. Predicted BMI was 1.8 kg/m2 higher for mothers with 3 + children than for mothers with 2 children, and their predicted probability of overweight and obesity was 18.3 and 8.6 percentage points higher, respectively. Results remained virtually unchanged after adjusting for age, educational attainment, country and wave of data collection.