A team of Canadian and Swiss researchers has added to a growing body of evidence that low earners are more likely to be in worse health and age sooner than their more financially secure peers.
“People with less wealth tended to have lower levels of function and suffered larger declines in mobility and ability to perform daily activities as they aged,” publisher PLOS Medicine said, following an analysis of health data for almost 32,000 people between the ages of 50 and 85 in United Kingdom and Canada.
Carried out by doctors at Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) and the University of British Columbia (UBC), the research showed that the poorest 60-year-old in England can have the walking speed of the wealthiest 75-year-old.
The team sought to clarify the association between wealth and measurements of physical well-being such as walking speed, grip strength, lung capacity and hearing as well as how well people could manage routine but essential activities such as dressing, bathing and eating.
PLOS described the findings as “correlational,” noting that the authors pointed out that the data did not include “childhood factors” or access to private healthcare.
However, the team said in the paper that the link between socioeconomic status and health held when “common risk factors, including health behaviours, weight status, chronic conditions, and social connections,” were taken into account.
The research is not the first to demonstrate a link between wealth and health, with the UBC-HUG team noting that “socioeconomic inequalities in functional ageing trajectories have previously been reported.”
In a 2020 paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, a University College London team said they found that signs of old age can typically be seen “much earlier in poorer people,” with gait speed almost 40% lower among the less well-off and a 10% difference in memory decline.
The UBC-HUG team said that their research added to the field by comparing data across countries, yielding fresh insights between regions and sexes.
According to Stephanie Schrempft of HUG, the data suggest that low income and socioeconomic status affect men and women differently when it comes to health and biological ageing.
“The least wealthy women struggled more with mobility and daily activities yet had better lung function than the least wealthy men,” she explained. – dpa
