When asked by health care professionals about their health, older African-American adults consistently report poorer health than whites of the same age do - even if both groups are functioning extremely well, a new study finds.
"Asking how a person would rate his or her health remains one of the simplest tools that a health professional has to quickly learn about a person's overall sense of well-being," said lead author Mindi Spencer, Ph.D. "The results of our study indicate that we cannot assume all people are considering the same factors when they answer this question."
Spencer is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Promotion, Education and Behavior and the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina.
The study appears in the January issue of the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences .
The researchers evaluated data from 2,729 adults, ages 70 to 79, who participated in the Health, Aging and Body Composition study that took place in and around Pittsburgh, Pa. and Memphis, Tenn. between 1997 and 1998.
Researchers asked participants the single question: "How would you rate your overall health?" with response categories of excellent, very good, good, fair or poor. Participants later received a clinical health assessment that rated their walking and balance, how many medications they were taking, whether they had been diagnosed with a chronic condition and if they were depressed.
The authors found that whites are 3.8 times more likely than African-Americans are to report favorable self-rated health, even among those in both groups who performed the same on the physical assessments. A greater proportion of African-American participants (27.3 percent) rated their health as fair or poor compared to whites (8.2 percent). A greater proportion of whites (17.6 percent) rated their health as excellent compared with only 8.7 percent of African-Americans.
"We thought that older adults who were high-functioning would be much more likely to rate their health as 'excellent' or 'very good,' but this was not the case for black older adults," Spencer said.
The authors attributed the disparity to many factors, one being that populations view the definition of what constitutes good or poor health differently.