Rich/poor health gap is for life

The gap in good health between the rich and poor is set early and remains constant over a lifetime, researchers in Canada found. Lead author Nancy Ross, a McGill University geography professor, analyzed data on 17,000 Canadians who were questioned about their health seven times during a 16-year period, from 1994/1995 and 2006/2007, by the National Population Health Survey. "We can't buy our way out of aging as we get older we start to have vision problems, maybe some hearing loss, maybe lose some mobility -- aging is a kind of a social equalizer," Ross says in a statement. "My research looks at how poverty and social disadvantage affect your health status. Our work was about using social circumstances as a lens to look at how people's quality of life changes as they age." There was no sign of an accelerated aging process for those who are lower on the social ladder the trajectories for declining health as people age look fairly similar across the social spectrum, Ross says. However, Ross says Canadians who are less educated and have a lower income start out less healthy than their wealthier and better-educated counterparts, and remain so during the course of their lives. "What we found, basically, is that people who are more educated and with higher incomes have a better health-related quality of life over their whole lifespan, and that these health 'tracks' stay pretty parallel over time," Ross says.