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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Health practices and disability
— some evidence from Alameda County, [California] | | Author(s) | Lester Breslow, Norman Breslow |
| Journal title | Preventive Medicine, vol 22, 1993 |
| Pages | pp 86-95 |
| Keywords | Health [elderly] ; Preventative medicine ; Physical disabilities ; At risk ; Longevity ; Death rate [statistics] ; Social surveys ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | With greater longevity, people are increasingly concerned abut how to avoid disability during their longer lives. Policy decisions concerning ways to extend health as well as life have become part of the health agenda in the US. Opportunity to examine this issue has arisen in the Alameda County Human Population Laboratory. Earlier studies there established seven health practices as risk factors for higher mortality: excessive alcohol consumption; smoking cigarettes; being obese; sleeping few hours, or more than 7-8 hours; having very little physical activity; eating between meals; and not eating breakfast. Observations now reveal that, taking account of age, gender and physical health status and social network index in 1965, the occurrence of disability was only about half as great among the cohort of survivors in 1974 who reported good health practices in 1965 as among those with poor health practices. Those with an intermediate level of health practices experienced about two-thirds the relative disability risk of those with poor health practices. Essentially similar relationships prevailed for the 1982/83 survivors of the original (1965) cohort, who, on being requestioned, had been free of disability in 1974. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-980828223 A |
| Classmark | CC: LK2: BN: CA3: BGA: S5: 3F: 7T * |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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