Widowhood and Mortality: A Meta-Analysis

J Robin Moon, Naoki Kondo, M Maria Glymour and S V Subramanian

PLOS ONE, 2011, vol. 6, issue 8, 1-9

Abstract: Background: While the "widowhood effect" is well known, there is substantial heterogeneity in the magnitude of effects reported in different studies. We conducted a meta-analysis of widowhood and mortality, focusing on longitudinal studies with follow-up from the time of bereavement. Methods and Findings: A random-effects meta-analysis was conducted to calculate the overall relative risk (RR) for subsequent mortality among 2,263,888 subjects from 15 prospective cohort studies. We found a statistically significant positive association between widowhood and mortality, but the widowhood effect was stronger in the period earlier than six months since bereavement (overall RR = 1.41, 95% CI: 1.26, 1.57) compared to the effect after six months (overall RR = 1.14, 95% CI: 1.10, 1.18). Meta-regression showed that the widowhood effect was not different for those aged younger than 65 years compared to those older than 65 (P = 0.25). There was, however, a difference in the magnitude of the widowhood effect by gender; for women the RR was not statistically significantly different from the null (overall RR = 1.04, 95% CI: 1.00, 1.08), while it was for men (overall RR = 1.23, 95% CI: 1.18, 1.28). Conclusions: The results suggest that further studies should focus more on the mechanisms that generate this association especially among men.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0023465 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 23465&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0023465

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023465

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).