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Yale Study: Unemployment Causes Higher Death Rates
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Business New Haven
6/10/2002
By:
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NEW HAVEN ‹ In the largest study of its kind on mortality patterns in Europe and the U.S., a Yale researcher has found a direct correlation between unemployment and mortality.
The study showed that high unemployment rates increase mortality and low unemployment decreases mortality and increases the sense of well-being in a community. Findings from the three-year study, commissioned by the European Union, were presented to members of the European Parliament and senior officials at a European Commission press conference on May 23 in Brussels.
Economic growth is the single most important factor relating to length of life, said principal investigator M. Harvey Brenner, visiting professor in the Global Health Division of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Medicine. Brenner is also professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University and senior professor of epidemiology at Berlin University of Technology.
Employment is the essential element of social status and it establishes a person as a contributing member of society and also has very important implications for self-esteem, said Brenner. When that is taken away, people become susceptible to depression, cardiovascular disease, AIDS and many other illnesses that increase mortality.
Prior studies on the impact of income on survival have focused on very poor countries with high poverty and infant mortality rates. This study shows that the same principles apply to highly industrialized and wealthy societies in which occupational differences based on skill level, wages and working conditions vary considerably. Brenner said this is compounded by ethnicity, and it is this distinction which still makes for the central differences in illness, mortality rates and life-expectancy in industrialized countries.
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