Revisiting Compression of Morbidity and Health Disparities in the 21st Century
Age, Socioeconomic Status, and Health
Compression of morbidity:
an ideal population health dynamic in which people live long, healthy lives with declines in physical and cognitive health associated with senescence “compressed” into a short time period at the end of life.
There are many ongoing debates in the compression of morbidity literature, including which measures of morbidity should be prioritized and the best methodological approaches for life course analyses that adequately address the thorny challenge of isolating age, period, and cohort effects. Even so, the extant research literature regarding compression of morbidity in the United States suggests that it is not happening at the population level.[3] However, much of the published research does not stratify analyses by socioeconomic position, as House and colleagues had recommended in 1990. House, Lantz, and Herd’s 2005 longitudinal analysis of ACL data affirmed that those in the highest income and education groups were significantly more likely to postpone physical functional impairments until much later in life
