Waaler revisited: The anthropometrics of mortality
Daniel Koch
Economics & Human Biology, 2011, vol. 9, issue 1, 106-117
Abstract:
Although many studies have been written about the relationship between BMI and human height on the one hand and mortality on the other, the issue of socio-economic status as confounding variable has been at times less emphasized. This study analyzes the influence of education and income on the relationship between BMI and mortality and between height and mortality. It is based on data collected between 1963 and 1975 by the Norwegian National Health Screening Service. 1.7 million subjects were recorded. The Norwegian statistics bureau linked these data to the national death records and to socio-economic information. We apply Cox proportional hazards regressions in order to determine whether adding income and education as covariates affects the relations among BMI, height, and mortality. Previous findings and insights are either not present or ambiguous. We conclude that the omission of SES does not significantly bias the effect of BMI on most causes of death, with one exception: type 2 diabetes mellitus, where the effect of BMI is substantially lower for both adults and adolescents when adjusted for education.
Keywords: BMI; Height; Mortality; Anthropometry; Socio-economic; status; Norway (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570-677X(10)00024-9
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:9:y:2011:i:1:p:106-117
Access Statistics for this article
Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten
More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().