Arbeitsbereich

Bevölkerung und Gesundheit

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Projekt

Health Inequalities in Immigrants: Burden of Multimorbidity (Dissertation)

Su Yeon Jang (MPIDR / Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, Niederlande), Mikko Myrskylä, Silvia Loi, Anna Oksuzyan (MPIDR / Bielefeld University, Deutschland), Frank J van Lenthe (Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, Niederlande)

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Immigrants face risks of unhealthy aging that are particularly high. It is well-known that older people have a higher prevalence of developing several chronic diseases than the younger population. The probability of developing multimorbidity (defined as having multiple chronic health conditions all at the same time) thus tends to increase with age. This PhD project studies the aging of immigrants over their stay in receiving countries, focusing on the health outcome measure of multimorbidity and social contexts (at the micro and macro level) that play important roles in modifying changes to their health.

The PhD project has several subprojects in order to give a multilateral view of immigrant multimorbidity as well as differences relative to the native population. The project addresses several research questions:

How do disease patterns of multimorbidity differ between immigrants and natives? We capture the patterns of immigrant multimorbidity compared to native populations, focusing on chronic disease combinations that are prevalent in the two populations.
Does aging affect health differently in immigrants and natives? We determine disparities between the health of immigrants and that of natives in age-related trajectories of gaining chronic diseases, and we examine variations in immigrant-native differentials depending on the origin and receiving country. The goal is to capture the differences from a structural perspective.
How is an immigrant’s health trajectory affected by his or her living arrangement? We address the immigrant-native disparities in multimorbidity at the individual level, focusing on living arrangements. We hypothesize that the rate of decline in health is steeper in immigrants because the number of single households is higher, leading to limited family ties.
How does the onset of chronic conditions differ between immigrants and natives? The subproject examines the sequences of immigrants developing chronic health conditions until death compared to natives. The hypothesis is that immigrants experience the onset of the first major chronic conditions at younger ages and become multimorbid over shorter time intervals relative to native-born individuals.

We draw on several longitudinal surveys, including the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and the US Health and Retirement Survey. They allow us to analyze the health status and socioeconomic features of older individuals in nationally-representative samples. Other potential sources of data include register-based datasets from Finland and the Netherlands.