Social class and mortality in older women.

In middle-aged people, social class is one of the strongest predictors of mortality. However, to date, research prospectively evaluating the relationship between social class and mortality in the older persons has produced conflicting results. This may be due to the lack of clinical covariates in many analyses. The objective of this study was to determine the relationship between social class markers-education, income, husband's work history, and personal work history-and mortality in a cohort of older women, after adjusting for clinical and behavioral factors. The participants were 737 ambulatory, community-living women, age 72 and older, followed from 1989 to 1993. In addition to education attained, present income, husband's work history, and personal work history, proportional hazard models adjusted for age, race, marital status, number of chronic conditions, number of medications used, Activities of Daily Living status, Mini-Mental State Exam score, physical activity, and alcohol use. In multivariable models personal work history was the only social class marker that remained significantly associated with mortality. Compared with managers and professionals, women who never worked outside the home had a 3.5 greater risk of death (95% CI, 1.6-7.5), while women who had worked in partly/unskilled or skilled professions were over two and a half times more likely to die; the adjusted hazard ratios were 2.7 (95% CI, 1.2-6.4) and 2.7 (95% CI, 1.3-5.7), respectively. In this population of older women, personal work history was the only social class marker predictive of mortality.