A recent study in the US shows that the older African Americans are more likely to rate their health as poor compared with older white Americans, even though when the two groups “are functioning extremely well.
The research conducted among a group of healthy Medicare-eligible patients in their 70s, African Americans consistently rated their health worse than did whites, in spite of the fact that an objective test found their physical functioning was just as good. The racial disparity was seen largest among the study participants who scored the highest on physical functioning tests. The research report is published in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences.

Dr. S. Melinda Spencer of the University of South Carolina in Columbia, who led the study states that physical functioning was not the only thing that is responsible for the overall rating of health. He clarifies that the definitions of health are very much culturally constructed. Self-rated health is an important aspect as it has been shown to predict a person’s risk of dying over the next few years. Dr. Spencer also notes that older African Americans are more pessimistic about their health than their white peers, and are also more likely to rate their health poorly.

Dr. Spencer and her team did the study on 2,729 men and women falling between the age group of 70 to 79 years to their performance on a series of four physical function tests. The subjects resided in or around the Pittsburgh or Memphis area and about 41 percent of the study participants were of African American origin out of which just over half were female.

The African-American study participants scored worse on the physical function tests, and were less satisfied with their levels of social support. Among them only 27.3 percent were rated their health as fair or poor, just 8.2 percent of whites did. Dr. Spencer says in her study that older African Americans have a different way of thinking about their health than do older whites, which may be another reason that is driving down their perception of their own health.

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