IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v68y2009i9p1583-1590.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do conditions in early life affect old-age mortality directly and indirectly? Evidence from 19th-century rural Sweden

Author

Listed:
  • Bengtsson, Tommy
  • Broström, Göran

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the disease load experienced during the birth year, measured as the infant mortality rate, had a significant influence on old-age mortality in nineteenth-century rural Sweden. We know that children born in years with very high rates of infant mortality, due to outbreaks of smallpox or whooping cough, and who still survived to adulthood and married, faced a life length several years shorter than others. We do not know, however, whether this is a direct effect, caused by permanent physical damage leading to fatal outcomes later in life, or an indirect effect, via its influence on accumulation of wealth and obtained socio-economic status. The Scanian Demographic Database, with information on five rural parishes in southern Sweden between 1813 and 1894, contains the data needed to distinguish between the two mechanisms. First, the effects of conditions in childhood on obtained socio-economic status as an adult are analyzed, then the effects of both early-life conditions and socio-economic status at various stages of life on old-age mortality. By including random effects, we take into account possible dependencies in the data due to kinship and marriage. We find that a high disease load during the first year of life had a strong negative impact on a person's ability to acquire wealth, never before shown for a historical setting. This means that it is indeed possible that the effects of disease load in the first year of life indirectly affect mortality in old age through obtained socio-economic status. We find, however, no effects of obtained socio-economic status on old-age mortality. While the result is interesting per se, constituting a debatable issue, it means that the argument that early-life conditions indirectly affect old-age mortality is not supported. Instead, we find support for the conclusion that the effect of the disease load in early-life is direct or, in other words, that physiological damage from severe infections at the start of life leads to higher mortality at older ages. Taking random effects at family level into account did not alter this conclusion.

Suggested Citation

  • Bengtsson, Tommy & Broström, Göran, 2009. "Do conditions in early life affect old-age mortality directly and indirectly? Evidence from 19th-century rural Sweden," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 68(9), pages 1583-1590, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:68:y:2009:i:9:p:1583-1590
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(09)00092-6
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Samuel H. Preston & Michael R. Haines, 1991. "Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number pres91-1, June.
    2. Harvey, A C & Jaeger, A, 1993. "Detrending, Stylized Facts and the Business Cycle," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 8(3), pages 231-247, July-Sept.
    3. Tommy Bengtsson & Cameron Campbell & James Z. Lee, 2004. "Life Under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262025515, December.
    4. Preston, Samuel H. & Hill, Mark E. & Drevenstedt, Greg L., 1998. "Childhood conditions that predict survival to advanced ages among African-Americans," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 47(9), pages 1231-1246, November.
    5. Allen, Robert C. & Bengtsson, Tommy & Dribe, Martin (ed.), 2005. "Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199280681.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Joseph Molitoris & Martin Dribe, 2016. "Industrialization and inequality revisited: mortality differentials and vulnerability to economic stress in Stockholm, 1878–1926," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 20(2), pages 176-197.
    2. Dong, Hao & Lee, James Z., 2014. "Kinship matters: Long-term mortality consequences of childhood migration, historical evidence from northeast China, 1792–1909," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 119(C), pages 274-283.
    3. Campbell, Cameron D. & Lee, James Z., 2009. "Long-term mortality consequences of childhood family context in Liaoning, China, 1749-1909," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 68(9), pages 1641-1648, May.
    4. Ryan Masters & Robert Hummer & Daniel Powers & Audrey Beck & Shih-Fan Lin & Brian Finch, 2014. "Long-Term Trends in Adult Mortality for U.S. Blacks and Whites: An Examination of Period- and Cohort-Based Changes," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 51(6), pages 2047-2073, December.
    5. Quaranta, Luciana, 2014. "Early life effects across the life course: The impact of individually defined exogenous measures of disease exposure on mortality by sex in 19th- and 20th-century Southern Sweden," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 119(C), pages 266-273.
    6. Hao Dong & Cameron Campbell & Satomi Kurosu & Wenshan Yang & James Lee, 2015. "New Sources for Comparative Social Science: Historical Population Panel Data From East Asia," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 52(3), pages 1061-1088, June.
    7. Schenk, Niels & van Poppel, Frans, 2011. "Social class, social mobility and mortality in the Netherlands, 1850-2004," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 48(3), pages 401-417, July.
    8. Leonardo Piccione & Gianpiero Dalla Zuanna & Alessandra Minello, 2014. "Mortality selection in the first three months of life and survival in the following thirty-three months in rural Veneto (North-East Italy) from 1816 to 1835," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 31(39), pages 1199-1228.
    9. Dora L. Costa, 2004. "Race and Older Age Mortality: Evidence from Union Army Veterans," NBER Working Papers 10902, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Martin Dribe & Christer Lundh, 2010. "Marriage choices and social reproduction," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 22(14), pages 347-382.
    11. Francisco J. Marco-Garcia & Víctor A. Luque de Haro, 2023. "The persistence of social inequality in adult mortality in rural Spain, death cohorts 1546-2010," Working Papers 0238, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    12. Emma Zang & Cameron Campbell, 2018. "Males’ Later-Life Mortality Consequences of Coresidence With Paternal Grandparents: Evidence From Northeast China, 1789–1909," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 55(2), pages 435-457, April.
    13. Alessandra Minello & Gianpiero Dalla Zuanna & Guido Alfani, 2021. "The growing number of given names as a clue to the beginning of the demographic transition in Europe," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 45(6), pages 187-220.
    14. Dora L. Costa & Joanna Lahey, 2003. "Becoming Oldest-Old: Evidence from Historical U.S. Data," NBER Working Papers 9933, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Timothy W. Guinnane & Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, 2013. "A Two-Tiered Demographic System: "Insiders" and "Outsiders" in Three Swabian Communities, 1558-1914," Working Papers 1021, Economic Growth Center, Yale University.
    16. Maystadt, Jean-François & Migali, Giuseppe, 2021. "The transmission of health across 7 generations in China, 1789–1906," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    17. Leah Boustan & Robert A. Margo, 2014. "Racial Differences in Health in Long-Run Perspective," Working Papers 2014-1, Princeton University. Economics Department..
    18. Leah Boustan & Robert A. Margo, 2014. "Racial Differences in Health in Long-Run Perspective: A Brief Introduction," NBER Working Papers 20765, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Barnes, Geoffrey & Guinnane, Timothy W., 2010. "Social Class and the Fertility Transition: A Critical Comment on the Statistical Results Reported in Simon Szreter's Fertility, Class and Gender in Great Britain, 1860-1940," Working Papers 87, Yale University, Department of Economics.
    20. Perron, Pierre & Wada, Tatsuma, 2016. "Measuring business cycles with structural breaks and outliers: Applications to international data," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(2), pages 281-303.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:68:y:2009:i:9:p:1583-1590. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.