Preventive medicine
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Preventive medicine · Jan 1993
Educational attainment and coronary heart disease risk: the Framingham Offspring Study.
Efforts to control the continuing epidemic of coronary heart disease in the United States have been successful according to certain criteria, such as mortality, but by others, such as morbidity, the picture is less clear. Documenting whether various subgroups of the population have adopted healthier lifestyles that are likely to reduce coronary heart disease risk is essential to understanding the status of the epidemic and, most importantly, to formulating prevention and health education strategies that will ameliorate its effects. ⋯ This study indicates that most components of the coronary heart disease risk profile show adverse levels in individuals with low educational attainment.
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With greater longevity people are increasingly concerned about how to avoid disability during their longer lives. Policy decisions concerning ways to extend health as well as life have become part of the nation's health agenda. ⋯ Observation now reveals that, taking into account age, gender, physical health status, and social network index in 1965, the occurrence of disability was only about one-half as great among the cohort survivors in 1974 who reported good health practices in 1965 as among those with poor health practices; those with an intermediate level of health practices experienced about two-thirds the relative disability risk of those with poor health practices. Essentially similar relationships prevailed for the 1982/1983 survivors of the original (1965) cohort who, upon requestioning, had been found to be without disability in 1974.