Although higher education has been associated with lower mortality rates in many studies, the effect of potential improvements in educational distribution on future mortality levels is unknown. We therefore estimated the impact of projected increases in higher education on mortality in European...

Our aim was to find out whether the associations between health and both individual and household economic position reflected a causal effect on health of household affluence and consumption potential. We attempted to separate this effect from health-selection effects, in other words the...

Healthy life expectancy is a composite measure of length and quality of life and an important indicator of health in aging populations. There are few cross-country comparisons of socioeconomic differences in healthy life expectancy. Most of the existing comparisons focus on Western Europe and...

The annual prevalence of psychotropic medication use exceeds 10 percent in Europe and the United States, the prevalence being higher among the divorced than the married. We analysed changes in the three-month prevalence of psychotropic medication use (psycholeptics and psychoanaleptics excluding...

Income inequalities widened considerably from 1987 to 2007 in Finland. We compared the association between household income and health problems across three periods and in several different ways of modelling the dependence. Our aim was to find out whether the change in the distribution of income...

Using nationally-representative register data for older people in Finland in period 1998–2003 we study how the number of days in acute hospital and long term institutional care services varies by age and proximity to death and how these use patterns change as mortality improves. Acute health...

Using life table measures, we compare educational differentials in all-cause mortality at ages 40 to 70 in Bulgaria to those in Finland and the United States. Specifically, we assess whether the relationship between education and mortality is modified by marital status. Although high education...

Circumstances over the life-course may contribute to adult social class differences in mortality. However, it is only rarely that the life-course approach has been applied to mortality studies among young adults. The aim of this study is to determine to what extent social class differences in...

The aim of this study was to assess the test-retest reliability of a measure of perceived general health by sex and age. The study analyzed data from the nationally representative Mini-Finland Health Survey of 8000 adults aged 30 and over. The subjects were invited to attend a personal health...