Centre for Policy on Ageing



Self-assessments of health — what do people know that predicts their mortality?
Author(s)	Yael Benyamini, Elaine A Leventhal, Howard Leventhal
Journal title	Research on Aging, vol 21, no 3, May 1999
Pages	pp 477-500
Keywords	Health [elderly] ; Attitude ; Death ; Indicators ; United States of America.
Annotation	Factors reflecting current experience - for example, number of medications used, poor function, negative affects, and positive affect - had stronger associations with self-assessments of health (SAH) than factors related to prior events (medical history, prior smoking) in baseline data for 830 retirement community residents (mean age 73). Participants appear to have implicit knowledge of the factors affecting their SAH. The rank order of the beta weights relating factors to SAH was correlated with the rank order of participant ratings of the attention given to each factor when making SAH judgments. Relationships of SAH and each of the factors to 5-year mortality showed that subjectively salient factors such as function and lack of energy predicted 5-year mortality, reduced the relationship of SAH to mortality, and accounted for most of the relationship of medical factors to mortality. Affective variables, however, had no relationship to mortality, despite their impact on SAH. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-990824237 A
Classmark	CC: DP: CW: 3RI: 7T
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing

...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.