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Comment by kimixa

2 years ago

I agree - an obvious connection would be "Lower income jobs tend to have less control over their schedule", be it shift workers, hourly service jobs or similar. There also may be links to worse healthcare due to lack of insurance in those jobs.

It might just be another "Poorer people don't live as long" correlation.

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kimixa

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sahmeepee  2 years ago

The source data is from the UK so it has nothing to do with the health insurance attached to specific jobs. Healthcare is covered via general taxation in the UK.

  • geysersam  2 years ago

    Interestingly enough, even in countries with tax funded healthcare people with lower income and socioeconomic status tend to receive worse healthcare (fewer expensive interventions, etc).

  • kimixa  2 years ago

    I'm aware of the UK system, having been born and lived there for over 25 years :) I didn't note that the data was from UK persons, but the general point likely remains, if not as strongly.

    While true health insurance isn't attached to jobs in the same way, there's still uneven access - the town I grew up in closed it's local surgery a decade or so ago, so it's about a 30 minute drive, or over 2 hours on a rather indirect bus. Not everyone has a car, or can afford to take pretty much an entire day off work to get there. Assuming you can actually get an appointment, too. Richer areas often are better served, and richer people have better access to transport and time flexibility.

    And my job came with BUPA membership, which can also make some things easier, it's not the hard barrier to any care in the same way as the American system.

    And while the paper said that it corrected for Socioeconomic status, knowing the /scale/ (and possible error) in that correction relative to the claimed meaningful difference would be useful in studies like this. It feels like the sort of correction should be detailed more than just saying they did it.

    But I guess the paper isn't really claiming causation, merely correlation in that it's a predictor of mortality. Though many commenters here seem to assume.

kaonwarb  2 years ago

They at least tried: "Results were adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, and sociodemographic, lifestyle, and health factors."

  • lazyasciiart  2 years ago

    I wonder if lifestyle or sociodemographic includes having specifically young children. That seems like a specific known temporary sleep disruption.

    • rcyeh  2 years ago

      Interesting, I initially thought this factor was probably negligible, because the cohort was aged "62.8 ± 7.8 years" (either before or after the 7-year observation period). I still think it's small, but perhaps not negligible.

      I estimate that some 2-4% of the group could be heavily involved in caring for grandchildren, sorting themselves into the irregular category. It's well-known that school-aged children pass flu to grandparents [2], and then grandparents die, just in time for the 7-year post-birth observation window. The absolute death rate due to flu is 10^-4 to 10^-3 per year, which would be visible on the paper's mortality time course chart.

      Estimation details:

      * some 20% are grandparents (and very few are parents) of young children [0] * 20-50% of grandparents care for grandchildren regularly [1]

      So maybe 4-10% of the cohort as an upper bound. If the birth rate is 12 per 1000 per year, and babies cause sleep disruption for about two years to two persons, then that's about 4% also, but perhaps mostly not the same age group.

      [0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5eeb975b86650...

      [1]: https://www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-news/articles/2017/september...

      [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00255...

      Going to sleep now.