Childhood misfortune as a threat to successful aging: avoiding disease

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether childhood misfortune reduces the likelihood of being disease free in adulthood.

Design and methods: This article used a sample of 3,000+ American adults, aged 25-74, who were first interviewed in 1995 and reinterviewed in 2005. Logistic regression was used to estimate the odds of avoiding disease at the first wave and remaining disease free a decade later.

Results: Consistent with a life course view of successful aging, higher levels of childhood misfortune (e.g., abuse, financial strain) are associated with a lower probability of disease avoidance. This pattern was observed across a large set of chronic conditions and in multivariate analyses spanning both waves of the study.

Implications: Childhood misfortune has approximately equal consequences for adult disease avoidance as does the combined effect of moderate lifetime smoking and obesity. Efforts to alleviate adverse experiences for children may have long-term benefits for successful aging.

Figure 1.

Comparison of childhood misfortune with other important risk factors for the predicted probability of disease avoidance. Note: Probabilities are calculated from the multivariate logistic regression model presented in Table 1. Besides childhood misfortune, smoking, obesity, age, and gender, all control variables are held at their means. Moderate smoking is defined as the 25th percentile lifetime smoking value for people who have ever smoked in the sample (equivalent to nearly 66,000 lifetime cigarettes; 65% of MIDUS respondents within that approximate value were former smokers in the 1995 interview).