title: Socioeconomic status across the life course and all-cause and cause-specific mortality in Finland.
abstract: We used high quality register based data to study the relationship between childhood and adult socio-demographic characteristics and all-cause and cause-specific mortality at ages 35-72 in Finland among cohorts born in 1936-1950. The analyses were based on a 10% sample of households drawn from the 1950 Finnish Census of Population with the follow-up of household members in subsequent censuses and death records beginning from the end of 1970 through the end of 2007. The strengths of these data come from the fact that neither childhood nor adult characteristics are self reported and thus are not subject to recall bias, misreporting and no loss to follow-up after age 35. In addition, the study population includes several families with at least two children enabling us to control for unobserved family characteristics. We documented significant associations between early life social and family conditions on all-cause mortality and cause-specific mortality, with protective effects of higher childhood socio-demographic characteristics varying between 10% and 30%. These associations were mostly mediated through adult educational attainment and occupation, suggesting that the indirect effects of childhood conditions were more important than their direct effects. We further found that adult socioeconomic status was a significant predictor of mortality. The associations between adult characteristics and mortality were robust to controls for observed and unobserved childhood characteristics. The results imply that long-term adverse health consequences of disadvantaged early life social circumstances may be mitigated by investments in educational and employment opportunities in early adulthood.
authors.affiliation: Population Studies Center & Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States. Electronic address: popelo@pop.upenn.edu.
authors.forename: Irma T
authors.initials: IT
authors.lastname: Elo
authors.affiliation: Population Research Unit, Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 18, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Pekka
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Martikainen
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. Electronic address: M.Myrskyla@lse.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Mikko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Myrskylä
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D002423:Cause of Death; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005387:Finland / Q000453:epidemiology; D054624:Health Status Disparities; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors
keywords: Adult socioeconomic status; Cause-specific mortality; Childhood socioeconomic status; Finland; Intergenerational; Mortality