Educational differences in the compression of disability incidence in the United States

OBJECTIVE: To examine educational differences in the compression of disability incidence in the United States. METHOD: We use the Health and Retirement Study and techniques of microsimulation and bootstrap to estimate the distribution of mortality and disability incidence for major education groups. RESULTS: Higher education is associated with a right shift in the age distributions of both mortality and disability incidence, and more compressed distributions above the modal ages (p<0.05). Our study also points to gender differences in the association between education and compression of mortality and disability incidence (p<0.05). DISCUSSION: To our knowledge, no prior studies have examined educational difference in compression of disability incidence and conducted formal tests for statistical significance. Educational differences in life span variation in mortality correspond closely with life span variation in disability incidence. One long-range implication of this work is growing inequality in life-span variation in disability incidence given trends in educational differences in life-span variation in mortality.