US exceptionalism? International trends in midlife mortality

BACKGROUND

Rising midlife mortality in the USA has raised concerns, particularly the increase in 'deaths of despair' (due to drugs, alcohol and suicide). Life expectancy is also stalling in other countries such as the UK, but how trends in midlife mortality are evolving outside the USA is less understood. We provide a synthesis of cause-specific mortality trends in midlife (25-64 years of age) for the USA and the UK as well as other high-income and Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.

METHODS

We document trends in midlife mortality in the USA, UK and a group of 13 high-income countries in Western Europe, Australia, Canada and Japan, as well as seven CEE countries from 1990 to 2019. We use annual mortality data from the World Health Organization Mortality Database to analyse sex- and age-specific (25-44, 45-54 and 55-64 years) age-standardized death rates across 15 major cause-of-death categories.

RESULTS

US midlife mortality rates have worsened since 1990 for several causes of death including drug-related, alcohol-related, suicide, metabolic diseases, nervous system diseases, respiratory diseases and infectious/parasitic diseases. Deaths due to homicide, transport accidents and cardiovascular diseases have declined since 1990 but saw recent increases or stalling of improvements. Midlife mortality also increased in the UK for people aged 45-54 year and in Canada, Poland and Sweden among for those aged 25-44 years.

CONCLUSIONS

The USA is increasingly falling behind not only high-income, but also CEE countries, some of which were heavily impacted by the post-socialist mortality crisis of the 1990s. Although levels of midlife mortality in the UK are substantially lower than those in the USA overall, there are signs that UK midlife mortality is worsening relative to that in Western Europe.

The management of COVID-19 cases through telemedicine in Brazil

In Dec 2020 Brazil became one of the worldwide epicenters of the COVID-19 pandemic with more than 7.2M reported cases. Brazil has a large territory with unequal distribution of healthcare resources including physicians. Resource limitation has been one of the main factors hampering Brazil's response to the COVID-19 crisis. Telemedicine has been an effective approach for COVID-19 management as it allows to reduce the risk of cross-contamination and provides support to remote rural locations. Here we present the analyses of teleconsultations from a countrywide telemedicine service (TelessáudeRS-UFRGS, TRS), that provides physician-to-physician remote support during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. We performed a descriptive analysis of the teleconsultation incoming calls and a text analysis from the call transcripts. Our findings indicate that TRS teleconsultations in Brazil experienced an exponential increment of 802.% during a period of 6 days, after the first death due to COVID-19 was reported. However, the number of teleconsultations cases decreased over time, despite the number of reported COVID-19 cases continuously increasing. The results also showed that physicians in low-income municipalities, based on GDP per capita, are less likely to consult the telemedicine service despite facing higher rates of COVID-19 cases. The text analysis of call transcripts from medical teleconsultations showed that the main concern of physicians were "asymptomatic" patients. We suggest an immediate reinforcement of telehealth services in the regions of lower income as a strategy to support COVID-19 management.

Education and mortality in three Eastern European populations: findings from the PrivMort retrospective cohort study

BACKGROUND

The aim of the study is 2-fold. Firstly, it attempts to investigate the potential impact of major political and economic changes on inequalities in all-cause mortality among men and women with different levels of education in three Eastern European countries. Secondly, to identify changes in contribution of smoking and drinking to educational differences in all-cause mortality. Study covers the period from 1982 to 2013.

METHODS

Data were collected in 2013-14 as a part of the PrivMort retrospective cohort study. Participants in Russia, Belarus and Hungary provided information on their educational attainment, health-related behaviors and vital statistics of their close relatives (N = 179 691). Odds ratios for mortality and relative indices of inequality (RII) were estimated for individuals aged 20-65 years, stratifying by three levels of educational attainment: higher, secondary and less than secondary education.

RESULTS

Those in lower educational groups were significantly more likely to die, through most time periods and sub-groups. The RII increased over time in all countries and both genders, except for Hungarian men. Alcohol consumption and smoking have increasingly contributed to educational inequalities in mortality during this period.

CONCLUSION

Educational inequalities in mortality in these Eastern European countries have increased during recent decades. Smoking and alcohol consumption, two major health-related behaviors, made a significant contribution to these increases in inequality.

Intergenerational Mobility in Relative Educational Attainment and Health-Related Behaviours

Research on intergenerational social mobility and health-related behaviours yields mixed findings. Depending on the direction of mobility and the type of mechanisms involved, we can expect positive or negative association between intergenerational mobility and health-related behaviours. Using data from a retrospective cohort study, conducted in more than 100 towns across Belarus, Hungary and Russia, we fit multilevel mixed-effects Poisson regressions with two measures of health-related behaviours: binge drinking and smoking. The main explanatory variable, intergenerational educational mobility is operationalised in terms of relative intergenerational educational trajectories based on the prevalence of specified qualifications in parental and offspring generations. In each country the associations between intergenerational educational mobility, binge drinking and smoking was examined with incidence rate ratios and predicted probabilities, using multiply imputed dataset for missing data and controlling for important confounders of health-related behaviours. We find that intergenerational mobility in relative educational attainment has varying association with binge drinking and smoking and the strength and direction of these effects depend on the country of analysis, the mode of mobility, the gender of respondents and the type of health-related behaviour. Along with accumulation and Falling from Grace hypotheses of the consequences of intergenerational mobility, our findings suggest that upward educational mobility in certain instances might be linked to improved health-related behaviours.

Mortality in Transition: Study Protocol of the PrivMort Project, a multilevel convenience cohort study

Background

Previous research using routine data identified rapid mass privatisation as an important driver of mortality crisis following the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. However, existing studies on the mortality crisis relying on individual level or routine data cannot assess both distal (societal) and proximal (individual) causes of mortality simultaneously. The aim of the PrivMort Project is to overcome these limitations and to investigate the role of societal factors (particularly rapid mass privatisation) and individual-level factors (e.g. alcohol consumption) in the mortality changes in post-communist countries.

Methods

The PrivMort conducts large-sample surveys in Russia, Belarus and Hungary. The approach is unique in comparing towns that have undergone rapid privatisation of their key industrial enterprises with those that experienced more gradual forms of privatisation, employing a multi-level retrospective cohort design that combines data on the industrial characteristics of the towns, socio-economic descriptions of the communities, settlement-level data, individual socio-economic characteristics, and individuals’ health behaviour. It then incorporates data on mortality of different types of relatives of survey respondents, employing a retrospective demographic approach, which enables linkage of historical patterns of mortality to exposures, based on experiences of family members. By May 2016, 63,073 respondents provided information on themselves and 205,607 relatives, of whom 102,971 had died. The settlement-level dataset contains information on 539 settlements and 12,082 enterprises in these settlements in Russia, 96 settlements and 271 enterprises in Belarus, and 52 settlement and 148 enterprises in Hungary.

Discussion

In addition to reinforcing existing evidence linking smoking, hazardous drinking and unemployment to mortality, the PrivMort dataset will investigate the variation in transition experiences for individual respondents and their families across settlements characterized by differing contextual factors, including industrial characteristics, simultaneously providing information about how excess mortality is distributed across settlements with various privatization strategies.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12889-016-3249-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.