Suchergebnisse

A negative educational gradient has been found for many causes of death. This association may be partly explained by confounding factors that affect both educational attainment and mortality. We correct the cause-specific educational gradient for observed individual background and unobserved family factors using an innovative method based on months lost due to a specific cause of death re-weighted by the probability of attaining a higher educational level. We use data on men with brothers from the Swedish Military Conscription Registry (1951–1983), linked to administrative registers. This dataset of some 700,000 men allows us to distinguish between five education levels and many causes of death. The empirical results reveal that raising the educational level from primary to tertiary would result in an additional 20 months of survival between ages 18 and 63. This improvement in mortality is mainly attributable to fewer deaths from external causes. The highly educated gain more than nine months due to the reduction in deaths from external causes, but gain only two months due to the reduction in cancer mortality and four months due to the reduction in cardiovascular mortality. Ignoring confounding would lead to an underestimation of the gains by educational attainment, especially for the less educated. Our results imply that if the education distribution of 50,000 Swedish men from the 1951 cohort were replaced with that of the corresponding 1983 cohort, 22% of the person-years that were lost to death between ages 18 and 63 would have been saved for this cohort.

A negative educational gradient has been found for many causes of death. This association may be partly explained by confounding factors that affect both educational attainment and mortality. We correct the cause-specific educational gradient for observed individual background and unobserved family factors using an innovative method based on months lost due to a specific cause of death re-weighted by the probability of attaining a higher educational level. We use data on men with brothers from the Swedish Military Conscription Registry (1951–1983), linked to administrative registers. This dataset of some 700,000 men allows us to distinguish between five education levels and many causes of death. The empirical results reveal that raising the educational level from primary to tertiary would result in an additional 20 months of survival between ages 18 and 63. This improvement in mortality is mainly attributable to fewer deaths from external causes. The highly educated gain more than nine months due to the reduction in deaths from external causes, but gain only two months due to the reduction in cancer mortality and four months due to the reduction in cardiovascular mortality. Ignoring confounding would lead to an underestimation of the gains by educational attainment, especially for the less educated. Our results imply that if the education distribution of 50,000 Swedish men from the 1951 cohort were replaced with that of the corresponding 1983 cohort, 22% of the person-years that were lost to death between ages 18 and 63 would have been saved for this cohort.

For many causes of death a negative educational gradient has been found. This association may be partly explained by confounding factors that affect both education attainment and mortality. We correct the cause-specific educational gradient for observed individual background and unobserved family factors, using an innovative method based on months lost due to a specific cause of death re-weighted by the probability to attain a higher education level. We use men with brothers in the Swedish Military Conscription Registry (1951-1983), linked to administrative Swedish registers. These data, comprising 700,000 men, allow us to distinguish five education levels and many causes of death. The empirical results reveal that improving education from primary to higher education would lead to 20 months longer survival between 18 and 63. The reduction in death due to external causes when improving education is attributable to most of these gains. Ignoring confounding would underestimate the educational gains, especially for the low educated. Implied by our results is that if 50,000 men from the 1951 cohort had had the 1983 education distribution they would have saved 22% of the person-years between ages 18 and 63 that were lost to death.

Education is negatively associated with mortality for most major causes of death. The literature ignores that cause-specific hazard rates are interdependent and that education and mortality both depend on cognitive ability. We analyze the education-mortality gradient at ages 18-63 using Swedish register data. We focus on months lost due to a specific cause of death which solves the interdependence problem, and use a structural model that derives cognitive ability from military conscription IQ scores. We derive the educational gains in months lost and the selection effects for each cause of death, and quantify the selection contribution of observed characteristics and unobserved cognitive ability. In a standard Cox model that controls for observed IQ, primary education was associated with 6 months lost when compared to secondary education. In a structural model that accounts for cognitive ability the difference was 43% larger. In addition, the largest educational gains were achieved for the lowest education group in the reduction of external cause mortality. The educational gains in cardiovascular mortality was small, mainly due to large selection effects. These results suggest that educational differences in cause specific mortality may be biased by conventional Cox regression analyses.

Psychosocial stress could lead to a wide range of possible physiological reactions, due to both the total burden of stress as well as individual susceptibility. Two useful Swedish registers to investigate early life influences on stress susceptibility are the Swedish Medical Birth Register (MBR) and the Military Service Conscription Register (MSCR). In a previous study we showed a positive relation between fetal growth and psychological functioning (PF) including an assessment of stress susceptibility.1 However, in that study we did not adjust for family social class—nor did another related study.2 We have therefore now carried out such an analysis in an expanded cohort study, by adding parental educational level as a marker of family social class. The aim was to investigate independent associations between fetal growth and stress susceptibility in young men.