Self-rated health, socioeconomic status and all-cause mortality in Chinese middle-aged and elderly adults

Our study aims to investigate the association between SRH and all-cause mortality, and to investigate whether the SRH-mortality association varies across different socioeconomic status (SES) groups among middle-aged and older Chinese adults. We used data from China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), including 11,762 participants for the final analysis. Cox proportional hazards regression was conducted to investigate the association between SRH status and subsequent mortality. There were 724 death events occurred. The results were shown that fair/poor SRH participants tend to die than better SRH peers (HR 1.46, 95% CI 1.12–1.91). The association only occurred in those with rural residency (HR 1.46, 95% CI 1.05–2.04), those who were literate (HR 1.65, 95% CI 1.17–2.33), those with above-average household income (HR 1.95, 95% CI 1.15–3.29) and those working in agriculture and below (HR 1.38, 95% CI 1.02–1.88). In conclusion, worse SRH may be a predictor of all-cause mortality among middle-aged and elderly Chinese, especially in people with rural residency, literacy, above-average household income and working in agriculture and below.