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Gender differential impact of bereavement on health outcomes: evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, 2011–2015

BACKGROUND: Bereavement is the experience of an individual following the death of a person of significance to the individual, most often referring to the spouse. Increased morbidity, health care utilization, and mortality are known to be associated with bereavement. Given China’s growing population...

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Autores principales: Chen, Zhuo, Ying, Jiahui, Ingles, Justin, Zhang, Donglan, Rajbhandari-Thapa, Janani, Wang, Ruoxi, Emerson, Kerstin Gerst, Feng, Zhanchun
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7583229/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33092555
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12888-020-02916-2
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author Chen, Zhuo
Ying, Jiahui
Ingles, Justin
Zhang, Donglan
Rajbhandari-Thapa, Janani
Wang, Ruoxi
Emerson, Kerstin Gerst
Feng, Zhanchun
author_facet Chen, Zhuo
Ying, Jiahui
Ingles, Justin
Zhang, Donglan
Rajbhandari-Thapa, Janani
Wang, Ruoxi
Emerson, Kerstin Gerst
Feng, Zhanchun
author_sort Chen, Zhuo
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Bereavement is the experience of an individual following the death of a person of significance to the individual, most often referring to the spouse. Increased morbidity, health care utilization, and mortality are known to be associated with bereavement. Given China’s growing population of older adults, there is a critical need to assess the health consequences of bereavement. METHOD: We use data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study to examine the impact of bereavement on mental health and quality of life among a sample of mid- and older-aged adults. We use propensity score matching to construct a matching sample and difference-in-differences method to estimate the impact of bereavement on mental health and self-assessed health. RESULTS: We find bereavement is associated with increased depression symptoms among women (1.542 point or 0.229 standard deviations of Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) 10 score) but not consistently for men over time. No statistically significant effect of bereavement on self-assessed health is found. CONCLUSIONS: Our results show a harmful impact of bereavement on mental health among older women in China and point to the need for a comprehensive policy on survivor benefits in China, particularly for rural older women.
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spelling pubmed-75832292020-10-26 Gender differential impact of bereavement on health outcomes: evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, 2011–2015 Chen, Zhuo Ying, Jiahui Ingles, Justin Zhang, Donglan Rajbhandari-Thapa, Janani Wang, Ruoxi Emerson, Kerstin Gerst Feng, Zhanchun BMC Psychiatry Research Article BACKGROUND: Bereavement is the experience of an individual following the death of a person of significance to the individual, most often referring to the spouse. Increased morbidity, health care utilization, and mortality are known to be associated with bereavement. Given China’s growing population of older adults, there is a critical need to assess the health consequences of bereavement. METHOD: We use data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study to examine the impact of bereavement on mental health and quality of life among a sample of mid- and older-aged adults. We use propensity score matching to construct a matching sample and difference-in-differences method to estimate the impact of bereavement on mental health and self-assessed health. RESULTS: We find bereavement is associated with increased depression symptoms among women (1.542 point or 0.229 standard deviations of Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) 10 score) but not consistently for men over time. No statistically significant effect of bereavement on self-assessed health is found. CONCLUSIONS: Our results show a harmful impact of bereavement on mental health among older women in China and point to the need for a comprehensive policy on survivor benefits in China, particularly for rural older women. BioMed Central 2020-10-22 /pmc/articles/PMC7583229/ /pubmed/33092555 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12888-020-02916-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Chen, Zhuo
Ying, Jiahui
Ingles, Justin
Zhang, Donglan
Rajbhandari-Thapa, Janani
Wang, Ruoxi
Emerson, Kerstin Gerst
Feng, Zhanchun
Gender differential impact of bereavement on health outcomes: evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, 2011–2015
title Gender differential impact of bereavement on health outcomes: evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, 2011–2015
title_full Gender differential impact of bereavement on health outcomes: evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, 2011–2015
title_fullStr Gender differential impact of bereavement on health outcomes: evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, 2011–2015
title_full_unstemmed Gender differential impact of bereavement on health outcomes: evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, 2011–2015
title_short Gender differential impact of bereavement on health outcomes: evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, 2011–2015
title_sort gender differential impact of bereavement on health outcomes: evidence from the china health and retirement longitudinal study, 2011–2015
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7583229/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33092555
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12888-020-02916-2
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