scholarly journals The Relationship Between Metabolic Health and Mortality Among Older Hispanics in the US and Mexico

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 875-875
Author(s):  
Maria Carabello

Abstract Studies consistently show that Hispanics, especially first-generation Mexican immigrants, face lower mortality risks in mid-to-late life than US-born non-Hispanic whites. This extended lifespan defies expectations given Hispanics’ disadvantaged socioeconomic status relative to whites and thus is referred to as the Hispanic paradox. However, it remains an open question as to whether the Hispanic paradox in mortality mirrors a lower chronic disease burden. To address this gap, this study will combine and leverage two harmonized longitudinal population-based data sources of late-middle-aged and older adults in the United States and Mexico; the Health and Retirement Study and the Mexican Health and Aging Study. First, I evaluate differences in the association between metabolic syndrome (MetS) and mortality risk for older adults living in Mexico, first-generation Mexican immigrants to the US, US-born Mexican Americans, and US-born whites. Second, I explore the extent to which the proportion of deaths attributable to MetS in each of these groups can be explained by differences in socioeconomic and health/behavioral characteristics. This study uses Cox proportional hazards models to estimate the mortality risks of MetS across groups, as well as the associated population attributable fractions (PAFs) to investigate potential differences within a decomposition framework. Developing this detailed understanding of metabolic health and the associated mortality risks across multiple generations of older Mexican immigrants may help us identify modifiable lifestyle and behavioral factors to better manage these conditions and alleviate possible complications as current and future generations of Mexican immigrants age in the US.

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 86-90
Author(s):  
Shervin Assari ◽  
Mohammed Saqib ◽  
Cheryl Wisseh ◽  
Mohsen Bazargan

Introduction: Socioeconomic status (SES) indicators are among the main social determinants of health and illness. Less, however, is known about the role of SES in the epidemiology of polypharmacy in immigrant Latino Americans living in the United States. This research studied the association between three SES indicators, education, income, and employment, and polypharmacy in older first generation Latino American immigrant adults. Methods: Data was obtained from the Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging (SALSA, 1996-2008). A total of 632 older first generation Mexican-American immigrants to the U.S. entered this analysis. The independent variables were education, income, and employment. Polypharmacy was the outcome. Age, gender, physical health, smoking, and drinking were the covariates. Binary logistic regression was used to analyze the data. Results: Employment was associated with lower odds of polypharmacy. The association between education and polypharmacy was above and beyond demographic factors, physical health, health behaviors, and health insurance. Neither education nor income were associated with polypharmacy. Other determinants of polypharmacy were poor self-rated health (SRH) and a higher number of chronic medical conditions (CMCs). Conclusion: Employment appears to be the major SES determinant of polypharmacy in older foreign-born Mexican Americans. Unemployed older Mexican American immigrants with multiple chronic diseases and those who have poor SRH have the highest need for an evaluation of polypharmacy. Given the age group of this population, most of them have health insurance, which provides an opportunity for reducing their polypharmacy.


1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 386-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine M. Allensworth

This study addresses the following questions: Are Mexican immigrants closing the earnings gap with greater time in the United States, compared to U.S.-born Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites? What factors are most important in determining their earnings? How are earnings determinants different for women versus men, and those who came to the United States as children, versus those who came as adults and those born in the United States? Data is drawn from the 1990 PUMS U.S. Population Census for Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, and Texas and includes only individuals ages 25–35. Determinants of education and hours of paid work are also analyzed as important means to higher incomes. With greater time in the United States, male immigrants achieve average earnings comparable to U.S.-born Mexican Americans, but not to non-Hispanic whites, controlling for human capital variables. With greater time in the United States, female immigrants approach the number of hours of paid work of U.S.-born women, but not the earnings received per hour. Gains in earnings associated with age, time in the United States, and English proficiency differ by gender, reflecting structural differences in the labor market. Immigrants who came to the United States as children show little difference in earnings, controlling for human capital, from U.S.-born Mexican Americans, while differing greatly from first generation immigrants who came as adults.


Author(s):  
Deborah E. Kanter

This book uses the Catholic parish to view Mexican immigration and ethnicity in the United States with a focus on Chicago. For Mexican immigrants, the parish had an Americanizing influence on its members. At the same time, many Mexican Americans gained a sense of mexicanidad by participating in the parish’s religious and social events. This process of building a Mexican identity and community in Chicago began in the 1920s. The first parishes served as refuges and as centers of community and identity. Mexicans fiercely attached themselves to specific parishes in Chicago, much like European American groups before them. The book explores how Chicago’s expanding Mexican Catholic population, contained in just two parishes prior to 1960, reshaped dozens of parishes and entire neighborhoods. The laity, often with Spanish-speaking clergy, made these parishes Mexican. The third largest archdiocese in the United States has, in many ways, become “Chicago católico,” a place where religious devotions hold sway well beyond church doors. With its century-old Mexican population, Chicago presaged a national trend. Today Latinos comprise 17 percent of the US population. This book’s parish-level research offers historic lessons for myriad communities currently undergoing ethnic succession and integration around the nation.


Author(s):  
Ana Elizabeth Rosas

In the 1940s, curbing undocumented Mexican immigrant entry into the United States became a US government priority because of an alleged immigration surge, which was blamed for the unemployment of an estimated 252,000 US domestic agricultural laborers. Publicly committed to asserting its control of undocumented Mexican immigrant entry, the US government used Operation Wetback, a binational INS border-enforcement operation, to strike a delicate balance between satisfying US growers’ unending demands for surplus Mexican immigrant labor and responding to the jobs lost by US domestic agricultural laborers. Yet Operation Wetback would also unintentionally and unexpectedly fuel a distinctly transnational pathway to legalization, marriage, and extended family formation for some Mexican immigrants.On July 12, 1951, US president Harry S. Truman’s signing of Public Law 78 initiated such a pathway for an estimated 125,000 undocumented Mexican immigrant laborers throughout the United States. This law was an extension the Bracero Program, a labor agreement between the Mexican and US governments that authorized the temporary contracting of braceros (male Mexican contract laborers) for labor in agricultural production and railroad maintenance. It was formative to undocumented Mexican immigrant laborers’ transnational pursuit of decisively personal goals in both Mexico and the United States.Section 501 of this law, which allowed employers to sponsor certain undocumented laborers, became a transnational pathway toward formalizing extended family relationships between braceros and Mexican American women. This article seeks to begin a discussion on how Operation Wetback unwittingly inspired a distinctly transnational approach to personal extended family relationships in Mexico and the United States among individuals of Mexican descent and varying legal statuses, a social matrix that remains relatively unexplored.


2019 ◽  
Vol 109 ◽  
pp. 192-198
Author(s):  
Heriberto Gonzalez-Lozano ◽  
Sandra Orozco-Aleman

We study how drug violence in Mexico and internal immigration enforcement in the United States affect the selectivity of Mexican immigrants. We find that violence is associated with an increase in English proficiency among immigrants. Furthermore, the deterrence effect of interior enforcement varies: it is associated with increases in the probability of observing undocumented immigrants with prior migration experience, who are English proficient and have higher unobservable abilities. Those factors are associated with a higher probability of finding a job, and higher productivity and earnings in the US labor market.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jia Wei ◽  
Anna Zhu ◽  
John S. Ji

AbstractVitamin D deficiency is a common health concern worldwide. We aim to compare the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency among older adults (65+) in China and the United States (US). We used data from the 2011 wave of Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) in China (n = 2180), and 2011–2014 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) in the US (n = 2283). Serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] was measured and a level of under 30/50 nmol/L was defined as vitamin D severe deficiency/deficiency. Risk factors of vitamin D deficiency were examined by multivariate regression models. We found that the mean 25(OH)D concentration was lower in China than in the US (45.1 vs. 83.5 nmol/L), with Chinese elderly lower than American elderly for every age group. 70.3% in China and 17.4% in the US were considered as vitamin D deficiency (30.6% and 3.4% were considered as severe deficiency). Older age, females, ethnic minorities, higher household income, self-rated “very bad” health, and never drinkers, were statistically significant in predicting lower serum 25(OH)D levels in China. In the US, males, ethnic minorities, lower income, self-rated “very bad” health, physically inactive, overweight, and obese were related to lower serum 25(OH)D levels. Our findings suggest that different interventional strategies are needed to improve vitamin D deficiency and its associated negative health outcomes in China and the US.


Author(s):  
Jimmy Patiño

As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diego’s volatile border region. In response, many San Diego activists rallied around the leadership of the small-scale print shop owner Herman Baca in the Chicano movement to empower Mexican Americans through Chicano self-determination. The combination of increasing repression and Chicano activism gradually produced a new conception of ethnic and racial community that included both established Mexican Americans and new Mexican immigrants. Here, Jimmy Patiño narrates the rise of this Chicano/Mexicano consciousness and the dawning awareness that Mexican Americans and Mexicans would have to work together to fight border enforcement policies that subjected Latinos of all statuses to legal violence. By placing the Chicano and Latino civil rights struggle on explicitly transnational terrain, Patiño fundamentally reorients the understanding of the Chicano movement. Ultimately, Patiño tells the story of how Chicano/Mexicano politics articulated an “abolitionist” position on immigration--going beyond the agreed upon assumptions shared by liberals and conservatives alike that deportations are inherent to any solutions to the still burgeoning immigration debate.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahra Ibrahimi ◽  
Deepa Dongarwar ◽  
Korede K. Yusuf ◽  
Sitratullah Olawunmi Maiyegun ◽  
Hamisu M. Salihu

Abstract The objective of this study was to assess trends in childhood viable pregnancy over the previous three decades as well as the risk of stillbirth in these highly vulnerable child mothers. We conducted a population-based retrospective cohort study that used Birth datasets, Fetal Death datasets, and the US population census data: 1982-2017. To assess the association between various socio-demographic and maternal comorbidities and stillbirth, we generated adjusted hazard ratios (AHR) from Cox Proportional Hazards Regression models. Overall, there were declines in the stillbirth rates in both teens (15-19 years old) and child mothers aged ≤ 14 years, but the rate remained consistently higher among child mothers. Compared to teen mothers, childhood pregnancy was modestly associated with elevated risk for stillbirth. Childhood pregnancy is a risk factor for stillbirth. These findings further underscore the need for sustained efforts and policies to prevent pregnancies in the early years of reproductive development.


Author(s):  
Jose Calderon

Sheba George's ethnographic study used participant-observation methods, purposive sampling, and an insider's transnational journey to examine changes in family and social roles that result when nurses from Kerala, India, immigrate to the United States ahead of their husbands. The author concludes that the economic and political gain immigration affords nurses does not translate into enhanced social status for their family in India nor for their husbands in the U.S. when they undergo a gender role transferal from primary breadwinner to homemaker whilst their wives pursue their nursing careers. In a key observation, the author emphasizes that this role transferal also caused shifts in gender structure within the U.S. Kerali community. The purpose of this paper is to offer a review of George's examination of resilience of patriarchal cultural mores and gender roles of Kerali "nurse husbands" in the U.S. and to cross-culturally compare their resilience to that of Puerto Rican men who were born and raised in Puerto Rico before migrating to the US mainland. This comparison is born of George's experience as a first-generation Kerali American and that of this reviewer as a first-generation Puerto Rican American.


Author(s):  
Marie-Josèphe Horner ◽  
Meredith S Shiels ◽  
Ruth M Pfeiffer ◽  
Eric A Engels

Abstract Background Antiretroviral therapy (ART) has reduced mortality among people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), but cancer remains an important cause of death. We characterized cancer-attributable mortality in the HIV population during 2001–2015. Methods We used data from population-based HIV and cancer registries in the United States (US). Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to estimate adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) associating cancer diagnoses with overall mortality, we could perhaps cut these words to accommodate the word limit. However readers will probably want to know what statistical adjustments were made to the model. Population-attributable fractions (PAFs) were calculated using these HRs and the proportion of deaths preceded by cancer. Cancer-specific PAFs and cancer-attributable mortality rates were calculated for demographic subgroups, AIDS-defining cancers (Kaposi sarcoma [KS], non-Hodgkin lymphoma [NHL], cervical cancer), and non–AIDS-defining cancers. Results Cancer-attributable mortality was 386.9 per 100 000 person-years, with 9.2% and 5.0% of deaths attributed to non–AIDS-defining and AIDS-defining cancers, respectively. Leading cancer-attributable deaths were from NHL (3.5%), lung cancer (2.4%), KS (1.3%), liver cancer (1.1%), and anal cancer (0.6%). Overall, cancer-attributable mortality declined from 484.0 per 100 000 person-years during 2001–2005 to 313.6 per 100 000 person-years during 2011–2015, while the PAF increased from 12.6% to 17.1%; the PAF for non–AIDS-defining cancers increased from 7.2% to 11.8% during 2011–2015. Cancer-attributable mortality was highest among those aged ≥60 years (952.2 per 100 000 person-years), with 19.0% of deaths attributed to non–AIDS-defining cancers. Conclusions Although cancer-attributable mortality has declined over time, it remains high and represents a growing fraction of deaths in the US HIV population. Mortality from non–AIDS-defining cancers may rise as the HIV population ages. ART access, early cancer detection, and improved cancer treatment are priorities for reducing cancer-attributable mortality.


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