Researchers have uncovered the secret to a long and healthy life. The solution is simple: “Be wealthy and you’ll live ten years longer.” That sounds like a bad joke. But it has long been known that wealth and lifespan are correlated. The Robert Koch Institute sees a direct connection between illness and income. Poorer people are more often affected by illnesses such as heart attacks, strokes, diabetes or chronic lung diseases. Rich people can enjoy a long retirement. Poor people, on the other hand, become obsolete early.
A study published in the “Journal of Gerontology” provides reliable data to support this assumption. The data comes from the USA and Great Britain and can also be transferred to Germany, as the researchers could not identify any significant differences between the two countries. This finding alone is surprising, as the US healthcare system is largely based on patient income, while the British have a public healthcare system that is open to every citizen. The study evaluated data from 10,754 and 14,803 adults aged 50 years. The British took part in the Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA), the US citizens in the American Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The data was collected starting in 2002 and tracked over a period of ten years.
The researchers did not examine the total remaining life expectancy, but rather the time that 50-year-olds still have left to live a symptom-free life. So they examined cohorts born before 1952. Dr. Paola Zaninotto, the study’s lead author, said: “While life expectancy is a useful indicator of health, quality of life in old age is also crucial. By measuring healthy life expectancy we can calculate the number of years of life we can live in a favorable state of health or without spend, appreciate disability.”
Several external factors influence symptom-free life expectancy, but the dominant factor is wealth. It was measured on the basis of net total assets. Comparisons were then made between the richest and the least wealthy third. The comparison groups are very large at 33. So small groups of the extremely rich and the extremely poor were not compared.
Nine years difference
The richest men aged 50 can therefore expect to live around 31 “healthy” years. One could say that, statistically speaking, they can enjoy their life carefree until they are 81. For poor men it is only about 22 years, which corresponds to age 72. The same pattern is found among women, except that their “health expectancy” is slightly longer than that of men for both groups. She is 83 and 74 years old. This is also an astonishing finding, because the “health expectations” of women are hardly higher than those of men. And in the years before 1952, it was still common for women to work significantly less and smoke and drink less than men. In Germany, the overall life expectancy of these age groups is around four to five years apart.
Since only people who were at least 50 years old were included in the study, it only provides information about the lives of older people. Previous deaths are hidden and therefore leveled between the groups. Since it can be assumed that the risk of an early death under the age of 50 is higher among the poor than among the wealthy, their life expectancy is likely to be even more below that of the rich.
The reasons for the differences are very different factors. Classic explanations include the proportion of heavy physical work and poorer medical care. However, it is also assumed that lifestyles and habits have a major influence – poor and rich people differ in points such as healthy diet, physical activity, tobacco and alcohol consumption. If you transfer the results of the study to the German pension system, you can see the political explosiveness. If you retire at the age of 65, a man with no assets only has, on average, seven years of symptom-free retirement, whereas the rich man can count on 16 good years. That’s more than double.
Source: Journal of GerontologyAlso read:
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Why life expectancy is increasing and we are not getting older
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