Childhood socioeconomic status and adult health

Cohen, Sheldon; Janicki-Deverts, Denise; Chen, Eric; Matthews, Karen A.

doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05334.x

Cited by 547 publications

(520 citation statements)

References 124 publications

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“…Unfortunately, because of the high degree of collinearity of income across the sample over the 15-y period, we cannot meaningfully disentangle the developmental timing of poverty exposure and adult psychological well-being. Although many studies suggest the critical importance of childhood disadvantage for subsequent physical morbidity in adulthood (35), caution is warranted given the high degree of income collinearity typically found in US samples between childhood and adulthood.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Childhood poverty and adult psychological well-being

Evans

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Childhood disadvantage has repeatedly been linked to adult physical morbidity and mortality. We show in a prospective, longitudinal design that childhood poverty predicts multimethodological indices of adult (24 y of age) psychological well-being while holding constant similar childhood outcomes assessed at age 9. Adults from low-income families manifest more allostatic load, an index of chronic physiological stress, higher levels of externalizing symptoms (e.g., aggression) but not internalizing symptoms (e.g., depression), and more helplessness behaviors. In addition, childhood poverty predicts deficits in adult short-term spatial memory.childhood disadvantage | psychological health | stress | helplessness | memory A n increasingly large body of work in public health and medicine reveals that childhood disadvantage is prospectively linked to adult physical morbidity and mortality (1-4). Moreover, early disadvantage may shape the long-term health trajectories of individuals in ways that are difficult to dislodge by subsequent upward social mobility. The present study builds upon and extends this life-course research on childhood disadvantage and adult physical health in two respects. First, we investigate psychological rather than physical health outcomes among adults as a function of childhood poverty. We examine multimethodological indices of adult psychological adjustment including mental health symptoms, short-term memory, helplessness behavior, and allostatic load. Second, because we have measures of these constructs early in childhood, we conduct prospective, longitudinal analyses, testing whether adults from more disadvantaged backgrounds manifest lower levels of psychological well-being 15 y later, independently of childhood well-being assessed at age 9.Thus, several measures of psychological well-being were investigated between ages 9 and 24 in relation to childhood poverty. The first of these, short-term memory, describes the number of bits of information individuals can hold in immediate memory. Short-term memory capacity is important because it influences the encoding of information into long-term memory and is associated with cognitive development among children (5, 6). Cross-sectional studies with elementary school children in two different samples reveal a positive association between household SES and shortterm memory span (7,8), and a field experiment shows that Mexican preschool children in households randomly receiving cash transfers of differing amounts, conditional on healthcare utilization and school attendance, yields a positive cash transfer dose-response for short-term memory (9). An important shortcoming in the poverty and memory literature is the paucity of longitudinal data, and no studies have investigated childhood SES and adult short-term memory.An aspect of psychological health that has garnered little attention in the poverty literature is helplessness. Disadvantaged children face a plethora of uncontrollable psychosocial (e.g., family turmoil) and physical (e.g., substandard ho...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Childhood poverty and adult psychological well-being

Evans

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Low-SES mothers live in more adverse environments, with greater exposure to such hazards as peeling lead-based paint, diesel exhaust, industrial emissions, and secondhand smoke (37,38), coupled with poorer access to health-promoting resources, such as recreational facilities, safe environments for exercise, full-service supermarkets, and produce markets (39). Such environments may foster overweight and obesity among low-SES women entering pregnancy and excessive or inadequate weight gain during pregnancy (40,41).…”

Section: Causality and Its Discontentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rigor, vigor, and the study of health disparities

Adler

Bush²,

Pantell

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

104

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Health disparities research spans multiple fields and methods and documents strong links between social disadvantage and poor health. Associations between socioeconomic status (SES) and health are often taken as evidence for the causal impact of SES on health, but alternative explanations, including the impact of health on SES, are plausible. Studies showing the influence of parents' SES on their children's health provide evidence for a causal pathway from SES to health, but have limitations. Health disparities researchers face tradeoffs between "rigor" and "vigor" in designing studies that demonstrate how social disadvantage becomes biologically embedded and results in poorer health. Rigorous designs aim to maximize precision in the measurement of SES and health outcomes through methods that provide the greatest control over temporal ordering and causal direction. To achieve precision, many studies use a single SES predictor and single disease. However, doing so oversimplifies the multifaceted, entwined nature of social disadvantage and may overestimate the impact of that one variable and underestimate the true impact of social disadvantage on health. In addition, SES effects on overall health and functioning are likely to be greater than effects on any one disease. Vigorous designs aim to capture this complexity and maximize ecological validity through more complete assessment of social disadvantage and health status, but may provide less-compelling evidence of causality. Newer approaches to both measurement and analysis may enable enhanced vigor as well as rigor. Incorporating both rigor and vigor into studies will provide a fuller understanding of the causes of health disparities.methodology | social determinants of health | cumulative risk G ood health and longevity are unequally distributed in populations. Although some unavoidable variations in health emanate from individual differences in vulnerability to disease, others are linked to membership in socially disadvantaged groups. The latter are unjust and have been the focus of considerable research and policy (1). Research on these health disparities has demonstrated consistent graded associations between various components of socioeconomic status (SES) and a wide range of health indicators; at each step up the social ladder, whether indexed by higher income, education, and/or occupational level, rates of morbidity and mortality decrease (2). The prevailing understanding of this relationship is that SES is a "fundamental cause" of health status (3), which operates through physical and/or psychosocial resources that are more readily available as SES increases, and hardships and adverse exposures that are more intense and frequent as SES decreases.Evidence for the SES-health gradient comes primarily from cross-sectional data linking contemporaneous measures of SES in adulthood with prevalence of disease, poor health, or mortality. Smaller literatures have established associations between socioeconomic conditions in childhood and childhood health, and betwe...

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“…One study inferred that the children of lower SES parents were less likely to be exposed to health-promoting behaviours and more likely to be exposed to risky behaviours [19]. From this stance, and in terms of contraceptive use, teenagers from Decile-1 might have less knowledge of safe sexual practices and less knowledge and confidence to access contraceptives [5] which would predispose these girls to more unplanned pregnancies than girls from higher deciles.…”

Section: Teenage Mothersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The same review [4] described higher risks of obstetric complications such as hypertension, pre-eclampsia, urinary tract infection and anaemia. The increased risk of negative health outcomes for teenage mothers continues into adulthood and old-age with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease [5] and more generally, poorer physical health compared to other women [6]. Finally, teenage pregnancy is associated with poorer child outcomes.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Risk of Teenage Motherhood Decreases in A Dose Response Fashion With Increasing SES: A Population-Based Study From British Columbia, Canada

2019

Journal of Women’s Health and Gynecology

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Background: Teenage mothers are more likely to be of low Socio-Economic Status (SES) but it is not known whether the risk abates abruptly in teenagers of middle SES or gradually over the range of SES. The health associations of teenage motherhood include poorer health behaviours during pregnancy such as increased use of tobacco and alcohol, and poorer nutrition. There are also increased obstetric risks, poorer child outcomes and poorer maternal health over the life-course. We hypothesized that the risk of teenage motherhood is greatest in those from the lowest SES decile and that this risk reduces with increasing SES.

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Childhood socioeconomic status and adult health

Cited by 547 publications

References 124 publications

Childhood poverty and adult psychological well-being

Childhood poverty and adult psychological well-being

Rigor, vigor, and the study of health disparities

The Risk of Teenage Motherhood Decreases in A Dose Response Fashion With Increasing SES: A Population-Based Study From British Columbia, Canada

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