Arbeitsbereich

Bevölkerung und Gesundheit

Auf einen Blick Projekte Publikationen Team

Projekt

Social and Economic Determinants of Physical and Mental Health Over the Life Course

Mikko Myrskylä, Marcus Ebeling, Pekka Martikainen, Yana Catherine Vierboom, Mine Kühn, Maarten Jacob Bijlsma, Anna Oksuzyan; in Zusammenarbeit mit Samuel H. Preston (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Vereinigte Staaten)

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Social and economic characteristics and conditions are key determinants of physical and mental health and of mortality. One of the most consistent findings in the social sciences is that socially disadvantaged groups have worse health and higher rates of mortality than socially advantaged groups. This pattern holds true across countries, among men and women, across practically all age groups, and almost no matter what measure of social status is used.

We address questions such as how social and economic factors influence older adults’ morbidity, mortality, and mental health. In studying morbidity, we extensively focus on hospital use, which is particularly important as older adults are disproportionately heavy users of health care services because of health vulnerabilities related to the aging process. We also seek to gain new and deeper insights into how social disparities in hospital usage change across later life, i.e., whether social disparities continue to grow, start to diminish, or remain stable with increasing age. Other key questions are whether certain living arrangements, such as living alone, are more closely related to higher levels of hospital use than living with a spouse or partner and how the relationship between living arrangements and hospital use differs with increasing age, net of individual heterogeneity. We also examine the effects of socioeconomic status on health, and health itself, on socioeconomic attainment.

In studying mental health, we focus on depression, which is a leading contributor to the global burden of disease, with a lifetime prevalence of 10 to 15% worldwide. The effects of depression extend far beyond its direct symptoms to a greatly increased risk of suicide and, possibly, of cardiac death. We focus on major social and economic determinants of depression, such as employment, income, family history, adverse events such as separation and divorce, and single parenthood.

To address these issues, we use data from a wide range of countries, including Austria, Belgium, China, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Our data sources are nationally representative longitudinal datasets, such as the Survey of Healthy Aging and Retirement in Europe, the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, the US National Health Interview Survey, and Finnish population register data. By using such a wide range of countries, which differ in population health metrics as well as the levels of social and economic developments and national welfare systems, we are able to build a broad understanding of the extent to which social and economic determinants of hospital use, morbidity, depression, and mortality vary across institutional settings.

Publikationen

Hale, J. M.; Schneider, D. C.; Mehta, N. K.; Myrskylä, M.:

Intersectionality and opportunity-weighted cumulative (dis)advantage

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2023-040. (2023)    

Korhonen, K.; Leinonen, T.; Tarkiainen, L.; Einiö, E.; Martikainen, P.:

Childhood socio-economic circumstances and dementia: prospective register-based cohort study of adulthood socio-economic and cardiovascular health mediators

International Journal of Epidemiology 52:2, 523–535. (2023)    

Kühn, M.; Dudel, C.; Werding, M.:

Maternal health, well-being, and employment transitions: a longitudinal comparison of partnered and single mothers in Germany

Social Science Research 114:102906, 1–14. (2023)    

Kühn, M.; Metsä-Simola, N.; Martikainen, P.:

Pathways into single motherhood, re-partnering, and trajectories of antidepressant medication purchases

Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 58:3, 409–420. (2023)    

Lahtinen, H.; Moustgaard, H.; Ripatti, S.; Martikainen, P.:

Association between genetic risk of alcohol consumption and alcohol-related morbidity and mortality under different alcohol policy conditions: evidence from the Finnish alcohol price reduction of 2004

Addiction 118:4, 678–685. (2023)    

Li, P.; Myrskylä, M.:

Disparities in quality of life among European cancer survivors aged 50 and over

European Journal of Public Health 22:Suppl. 2, ii642–ii642. (2023)    

Sariaslan, A.; Fanshawe, T.; Pitkänen, J.; Cipriani, A.; Martikainen, P.; Fazel, S.:

Predicting suicide risk in 137,112 people with severe mental illness in Finland: external validation of the Oxford Mental Illness and Suicide tool (OxMIS)

Translational Psychiatry 13:126, 1–5. (2023)    

Stickley, A.; Baburin, A.; Jasilionis, D.; Krumins, J.; Martikainen, P.; Kondo, N.; Shin, J. I.; Inoue, Y.; Leinsalu, M.:

Sociodemographic inequalities in mortality from drowning in the Baltic countries and Finland in 2000–2015: a register-based study

BMC Public Health 23:1103, 1–9. (2023)    

Tarkiainen, L.; Martikainen, P.:

Long-term trends in urban-neighbourhood inequalities in cause-specific mortality and hospitalisation: multilevel analyses among individuals nested in Finnish post-code areas, 1991–2018

SSM-Population Health 21:101323, 1–8. (2023)    

Yao, H.; Junna, L. M.; Hu, Y.; Sha, X.; Martikainen, P.:

The relationship of income on stroke incidence in Finland and China

European Journal of Public Health 33:3, 360–365. (2023)    

Högnäs, R. S.; Bijlsma, M. J.; Högnäs, U.; Blomqvist, S.; Westerlund, H.; Magnusson Hanson, L.:

It's giving me the blues: a fixed-effects and g-formula approach to understanding job insecurity, sleep disturbances, and major depression

Social Science and Medicine 297:114805, 1–10. (2022)    

Howe, L. J.; Rasheed, H.; Jones, P. R.; Boomsma, D. I.; Evans, D. M.; Giannelis, A.; Hayward, C.; Hopper, J. L.; Hughes, A.; Lahtinen, H.; Li, S.; Lind, P. A.; Martin, N. G.; Martikainen, P.; Medland, S. E.; Morris, T. T.; Nivard, M. G.; Pingault, J.; Silventoinen, K.; Smith, J. A.; Willoughby, E. A.; Wilson, J. F.; Social Science Genetic Association Consortium within Family Consortium; Åsvold, B. O.; Næss, Ø. E.; Smith, G. D.; Kaprio, J.; Brumpton, B.; Davies, N. M.:

Educational attainment, health outcomes and mortality: a within-sibship Mendelian randomization study

medRxiv preprints. unpublished. (2022)    

Junna, L. M.; Moustgaard, H.; Martikainen, P.:

Health-related selection into employment among the unemployed

BMC Public Health 22:657, 1–12. (2022)    

Kühn, M.; Baranowska, A.; Metsä-Simola, N.; Junna, L. M.; Martikainen, P.:

The effects of unemployment among single mothers on adolescent children’s mental health

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2022-026. (2022)    

Mäki, M.; Hägglund, A. E.; Rotkirch, A.; Kulathinal, S.; Myrskylä, M.:

Stable marital histories predict happiness and health across educational groups

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2022-035. (2022)    

Metsä-Simola, N.; Remes, H. M.; Hiltunen, E. M.; Martikainen, P.:

Changes in parents' psychotropic medication use following child's cancer diagnosis: a fixed‐effects register‐study in Finland

Cancer Medicine 11:16, 3145–3155. (2022)    

Mikkonen, J.; Savolainen, J.; Aaltonen, M.; Martikainen, P.:

Using age difference and sex similarity to detect evidence of sibling influence on criminal offending

Psychological Medicine 52:10, 1892–1900. (2022)    

Pitkänen, J.; Remes, H. M.; Aaltonen, M.; Martikainen, P.:

Socioeconomic differences in psychiatric treatment before and after self-harm: an observational study of 4,280 adolescents and young adults

BMC Psychiatry 22:14, 1–13. (2022)    

Preston, S. H.; Vierboom, Y. C.:

How major risk factors influence mortality trends in the National Health Interview Survey

Population Center Working Paper (PSC/PARC) Series 2022-93, Philadelphia, PA. (2022)    

Silventoinen, K.; Korhonen, K.; Martikainen, P.:

Changing associations of coronary heart disease incidence with current partnership status and marital history over three decades

SSM-Population Health 18:101080, 1–8. (2022)    

Silventoinen, K.; Lahtinen, H.; Korhonen, K.; Smith, G. D.; Ripatti, S.; Morris, T. T.; Martikainen, P.:

Marital status and genetic liability independently predict coronary heart disease incidence

Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 1–4. (2022)    

Hendi, A. S.; Elo, I. T.; Martikainen, P.:

The implications of changing education distributions for life expectancy gradients

Social Science and Medicine 272:113712, 1–11. (2021)    

Hoffmann, R.; Kröger, H.:

Comparing the educational gradients in three cardiovascular disease-specific health measures

Longitudinal and Life Course Studies 12:4, 591–607. (2021)    

Höhn, A.; Oksuzyan, A.; Lindahl-Jacobsen, R.; Christensen, K.; Seaman, R. J.:

Gender differences in time to first hospital admission at age 60 in Denmark, 1995-2014

European Journal of Ageing 18:4, 443–451. (2021)    

Junna, L. M.; Tarkiainen, L.; Östergren, O.; Jasilionis, D.; Martikainen, P.:

Exploring the longevity advantage of doctorates in Finland and Sweden: the role of smoking- and alcohol-related causes of death

Scandinavian Journal of Public Health 49:4, 419–422. (2021)    

Korhonen, K.; Moustgaard, H.; Tarkiainen, L.; Östergren, O.; Costa. G.; Urhoj, S. . K.; Martikainen, P.:

Contributions of specific causes of death by age to the shorter life expectancy in depression: a register-based observational study from Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Italy

Journal of Affective Disorders 295, 831–838. (2021)    

Martikainen, P.; Korhonen, K.; Tarkiainen, L.:

Heavy metal toxicity and mortality-association between density of heavy metal bands and cause specific hospital admissions and mortality: population based cohort study

BMJ 375:8319, e067633–e067633. (2021)    

Metsä-Simola, N.; Baranowska-Rataj, A.; Remes, H. M.; Kühn, M.; Martikainen, P.:

Support from grandparents and mothers’ depression around the time of separation

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2021-020. (2021)    

Metsä-Simola, N.; Einiö, E.; Peltonen, R.; Martikainen, P.:

Physical health conditions and subsequent union separation: a couple-level register study on neurological conditions, heart and lung disease, and cancer

Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 75:7, 674–680. (2021)    

Mikkonen, J.; Remes, H. M.; Moustgaard, H.; Martikainen, P.:

Early adolescent health problems, school performance, and upper secondary educational pathways: a counterfactual-based mediation analysis

Social Forces 99:3, 1146–1175. (2021)    

Pitkänen, J.; Bijlsma, M. J.; Remes, H. M.; Aaltonen, M.; Martikainen, P.:

The effect of low childhood income on self-harm in young adulthood: mediation by adolescent mental health, behavioural factors and school performance

SSM-Population Health 13:100756, 1–9. (2021)    

Preston, S. H.; Vierboom, Y. C.:

Excess mortality in the United States in the 21st century

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 118:16, e2024850118–e2024850118. (2021)    

Tarkiainen, L.; Moustgaard, H.; Korhonen, K.; Noordzij, J. M.; Beenackers, M. A.; van Lenthe, F. J.; Burstrom, B.; Martikainen, P.:

Association between neighbourhood characteristics and antidepressant use at older ages: a register-based study of urban areas in three European countries

Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 75:5, 426–432. (2021)    

van Hedel, K.; Moustgaard, H.; Myrskylä, M.; Martikainen, P.:

Work-family typologies and mental health among women in early working ages

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2021-015. (2021)    

Yang, L.; Hu, Y.; Silventoinen, K.; Martikainen, P.:

Childhood adversity and trajectories of multimorbidity in mid-late life: China health and longitudinal retirement study

Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 75:6, 593–600. (2021)    

Hu, Y.; Leinonen, T.; Myrskylä, M.; Martikainen, P.:

Changes in socioeconomic differences in hospital days with age: cumulative disadvantage, age-as-leveler, or both?

Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 75:6, 1336–1347. (2020)    

Martikainen, P.; Elo, I. T.; Tarkiainen, L.; Mikkonen, J.; Myrskylä, M.; Moustgaard, H.:

The changing contribution of childhood social characteristics to mortality: a comparison of Finnish cohorts born in 1936–50 and 1961–75

International Journal of Epidemiology 49:3, 896–907. (2020)    

Metsä-Simola, N.; Moustgaard, H.; Martikainen, P.:

Time patterns of external and alcohol-related mortality after marital and non-marital separation: the contribution of psychiatric morbidity

Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 74:6, 510–518. (2020)    

Mikkonen, J.; Remes, H. M.; Moustgaard, H.; Martikainen, P.:

Evaluating the role of parental education and adolescent health problems in educational attainment

Demography 57:6, 2245–2267. (2020)