Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death - Competitive Revision

描述（由申请人提供）：本次修订的主要目标是创建一个公共使用的数据集，使研究人员能够克服理解非洲裔美国人健康长期趋势的关键障碍-缺乏数据。超过85%的申请资金用于建立21000名在联邦军队服役的非裔美国新兵的纵向数据集。这些数据为1910年前后65岁以上的非裔美国人提供了异常丰富的健康和社会经济信息来源。加上这个项目已经建立的现存的6000人样本，非裔美国新兵的总样本将达到27000人。本次修订的总体分析目标是：1)确定这组非裔美国人在老年时在一些健康指标上的表现，包括合并症；2)比较这群非裔美国人和同一群美国白人的健康状况，以了解20世纪初健康差异的程度，并确定健康上的侮辱是留下了永久的伤疤，还是导致了晚年选择最强壮的个体；3)调查接触传染病的差异、营养状况的差异和社会经济差异如何导致观察到的老年健康差异；4)调查年轻、中年和老年健康侮辱的相对重要性，以及这些健康侮辱对该非裔美国人队列的健康和死亡率的相互作用；5)调查在社会保障体系建立之前，一项非劳动所得的政府收入转移如何影响非常贫困的人口（如所研究的非裔美国人队列）应对老龄化的方式。这一修订将有助于实现父母补助金的总体目的，即更准确地了解21世纪前三分之一的人口的老龄化轨迹，这些人口比他们的前辈更长寿、更富裕、更城市化。它将通过将联邦军队样本中代表性不足的群体纳入母体赠款来实现这一目标。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The primary goal of this revision is to create a public use data set that will enable researchers to overcome the critical barrier to understanding long-run trends in the health of African Americans - lack of data. Over 85 percent of the requested funding is for the creation of a longitudinal data set of 21,000 African American recruits who served in the Union Army. These data provide an unusually rich source of health and socioeconomic information on the cohort of African Americans who reached age 65 circa 1910. Together with an extant sample of 6,000 men already created by this program project, the total sample of African American recruits will be 27,000. The overall analytical aims of this revision are: 1) Establish how this cohort of African Americans fared on a number of health measures, including co-morbidities, at older ages; 2) Compare the health of this cohort of African Americans with the same cohort of white Americans to understand the extent of health disparities at the beginning of the twentieth century and to determine whether health insults left a permanent scar or led to the selection of the hardiest Individuals at late ages; 3) Investigate how differences in exposure to infectious disease, differences in nutritional status, and socioeconomic differentials contributed to any observed health disparities at older ages; 4) Investigate the relative importance of health insults at a young age, middle age, and at old ages, and the interactive effects of these health insults, to the health and mortality of this cohort of African Americans; 5) Investigate how an unearned government income transfer affected how a very poor population (as was true of the African American cohort studied) coped with aging prior to the availability of a social security system. This revision will help fulfill the overarching purpose of the parent grant, which is to gain a more precise understanding of the trajectory of aging for the populations of the first third of twenty-first century that are longer-lived, more affluent, and more urban than their predecessors. It will accomplish this goal by building on the parent grant's incorporation of under-represented groups in the Union Army sample. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This revision will provide evidence on how the shapes of mortality and health trajectories of African Americans evolved over time, during an era that was marked by diverse and rapidly changing ecological, economic, and social conditions. This revision can provide insights into future trends in life expectancy and in the health and disability of the elderly both in the US and in developing countries.