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The relationship between subjective state of health and 5-year survival in an elderly cohort was examined. During the 1978 study of the elderly population of Kiryat Ono, a suburban community in the central coastal area of Israel, respondents were asked to evaluate their general health status on a four-level scale, and their vital status was updated until 1983. A multivariate analysis of survival was conducted using the Cox Proportional Hazards Model. Self-rating of health was an independent predictor of survival after controlling for age, sex, continent of origin, number of conditions and medications reported, heart disease and activities of daily living (ADL). The self-rating of health was found to be an important psychosocial parameter in the evaluation of health status, in determining the prognosis of an elderly person, and in analyzing survival.

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BackgroundUnlike the widely used self rated health, the self rated mental health was found unsuitable as a proxy for mental illness. This paper analyses the relationships between the self ratings of physical health, mental health and overall health, and their association of with the objective indicators for physical and mental health.Design and methodsThe study is a secondary analysis of data from a nationwide representative sample of the non-institutionalized adult residents of Israel in 2003 that was collected via computer-assisted personal interview methods [n=4859].ResultsThe self rated physical health and the self rated mental health were strongly related to each other yet the self rated mental health was not related to chronic physical conditions and the self rated physical health was not related to mental disorders. In a multiple logistic regression analysis, those with positive self rated mental health had 93 times the odds of reporting positive overall health whereas those with positive self rated physical health had 40 times the odds of reporting positive overall health.ConclusionsThe self rating of mental health presents a qualitatively different dimension from mental illness. The self rated mental health is two times more important than the self rated physical health in predicting the self rated overall healthSignificance for public healthThe present study is an original study on the self rated physical, mental and overall health measures. Because of the wide range of associations with other health indicators, and the simplicity with which they are collected, self-rated health measures are widely used in large population surveys.The present study questions the automatic assumption that the self rated mental health functions as a proxy measure of psychiatric morbidity, and suggests that the self rated mental health is more closely related to subjective well-being. The results show that self rated mental health predicts self rated general health better than self rated physical health.

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