1945

Abstract

Old age disadvantage begins at birth. Much of the inequality between older persons has its roots in early life conditions. Without policies to prevent it, disadvantages reinforce one another through peoples’ lives, leading to large disparities among older adults. A life course perspective on ageing is critical to improving people’s health and well-being throughout the life course into old age. The onset and severity of disability – affecting either physical or mental health – profoundly impacts the lives of people and their families and incurs large economic and societal costs in terms of health care and caregiving needs. Disability is a key outcome of unequal ageing as it has been tied to both early life conditions, such as childhood poverty and later life risk factors, including health behaviors, occupation and chronic stress. Examining physical functional limitations as a measure of disability lends itself to cross-national comparisons of inequalities in health in old age as it measures difficulties that people face in carrying out tasks in their daily living, and does not depend on access to health care and medical professionals for diagnosis, as is the case for examining differences in the prevalence of diseases, such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease.

You do not have access to article level metrics. Please click here to request access

/content/papers/10.18356/27081990-147
Loading
  • Published online: 05 Jan 2023
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error
aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cudW4taWxpYnJhcnkub3JnLw==