How having children, and their level of education, can affect health in old age - BMC Series blog

How having children, and their level of education, can affect health in old age - BMC Series blog

Anna Meyer, Hannah L Brooke & Karin Modig

Anna Meyer is a PhD candidate in Epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. Her work primarily focuses on health and mortality trends in the ageing Swedish population. Specific research interests include health and mortality among the old, sociodemographic differences, and disparities between parents and childless men and women.

Hannah L Brooke is a post-doctoral research fellow at Uppsala University with a PhD in Epidemiology. She specializes in using register-based data to study socioeconomic factors in relation to cancer incidence and survival.

Karin Modig is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. She is also guest researcher at Max Planch Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany. Her research concerns the health of the ageing population, the driving force of longevity and its societal consequences.

How having children, and their level of education, can affect health in old age

Although it is known that parents generally live longer than their childless contemporaries, little is known about why or what factors modify this effect. In this blog post, the authors of a recent study of multiple health outcomes in over 800,000 individuals, published in BMC Geriatrics, highlight and discuss some of their findings, shedding light on these unknown mechanisms.

Anna Meyer, Hannah L Brooke & Karin Modig 30 Apr 2019

Parenting is not an easy job, but the hard work may eventually pay off. Research demonstrates that parents have lower mortality rates in old age than childless men and women. Although this finding has been replicated often and in various settings, many questions still remain unanswered.