OBJECTIVES to examine the association between 34-year trajectories of social activity, from middle age to old age and late-life disability. METHODS data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey (LNU) and the Swedish Panel Study of the Oldest Old (SWEOLD) were used. LNU data from 1968, 1981, 1991 and 2000 were merged with SWEOLD data from 1992, 2002 and 2004 to create a longitudinal data set wi...

OBJECTIVE To test the validity of age at menarche self-reported in adulthood and examine whether socioeconomic position, education, experience of gynaecological events and psychological symptoms influence the accuracy of recall. DESIGN Prospective birth cohort study. SETTING England, Scotland and Wales. PARTICIPANTS 1050 women from the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health an...

Ten young women (age 20 to 22 years) and 10 middle-aged women (age 36 to 44 years) served as subjects in choice reaction time, letter classification, and abstract matching-to-sample tasks. In each of seven conditions, the older group responded more slowly than the younger group. Age differences showed a complexity effect. That is, differences between the latencies of young and old subjects incr...

Disease classes have hitherto been based on anatomical pathology and structural lesions belonging to an earlier ecological medical model involving classification. The diseases of ageing now coming to dominate clinical practice evolve across the clinical threshold in middle age parallel to changes occurring in the internal environment. The concept 'multiple pathology' used to describe the plural...

This paper investigates how the association between cognitive achievement and self-rated health in middle age differs by race, and attempts to explain these differences. The role of cognition in health determination has received only limited empirical attention, and even less is known about how race may affect this relationship. Using data from the NLSY, I find that while Whites with higher cog...

Many empirical studies point towards an increase in non‐standard employment. The reasons for this rise are mainly seen in the increasing economic internationalization or the rapid technological changes which raise the need for both flexibility and cost‐cuts on behalf of firms. Yet, only little is known about the role of firm age in this context. Based on a large representative data set of est...

Death rates are widely used as a convenient way of summarising important aspects of health in a population. However, they are not always easy to interpret, and even when techniques such as standardisation are used the impact of premature death may be difficult to assess. Cohort analysis provides summary information that takes account of age at death and that can be displayed graphically in a re...

BACKGROUND Cystatin C, a marker of renal function, has been shown to be an independent predictor of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in older adults, but few data are available in middle-aged adults. Moreover, no study has compared cystatin C and microalbuminuria as risk factors for CVD outcomes in middle-aged adults, and it is not known whether cystatin C is related to an early stage of atheroscle...

INTRODUCTION Few prospective cohort studies have examined the association between physical activity (PA) and insomnia prevention, and the effective PA intensity remains unclear. This prospective study explores how PA intensity prevents incident short sleep duration and subjective insufficient sleep in middle-aged and older adults. METHODS A self-reported questionnaire gathered data on sleep a...

Gender and age have been found to affect adults' audio-visual (AV) speech perception. However, research on adult aging focuses on adults over 60 years, who have an increasing likelihood for cognitive and sensory decline, which may confound positive effects of age-related AV-experience and its interaction with gender. Observed age and gender differences in AV speech perception may also depend on...