The aim of the study, which is being published Thursday in The Journal of Health and Social Behavior, was to explain the growing gap in mortality between white women without a high school diploma and those with a high school diploma or more.

 The study found that the odds of dying for the least educated women were 37 percent greater than for their more educated peers in any given year in the period of 1997 to 2001. The odds had risen to 66 percent by the period of 2002 to 2006. The authors controlled for age.

The researchers used a health survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, drawing on data from about 47,000 women ages 45 to 84. The study weighed more than a dozen factors to see which were causing the divergence in mortality rates. Poverty, obesity, homeownership, marital status and alcohol consumption were among the factors investigated.

 But they mattered little. As it turned out, smoking was important, as had long been established, but researchers were surprised that joblessness had a dramatic effect, even after controlling for factors that employment would have generated, like income and health insurance.

“What is it about employment that has this huge impact on mortality, beyond the material resources it brings?” said Jennifer Karas Montez, the study’s lead author, a researcher at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

 The study was an attempt to explain the reasons behind the troubling trend of declining life expectancy for the least educated Americans, particularly women. A study last year found that white women without a high school diploma lost five years of life expectancy between 1990 and 2008, a measure of decline last seen among Russians in the economic chaos that came after the fall of the Soviet Union. This year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that mortality for women had gone up in more than 40 percent of the counties in the United States since the early 1990s.

But the study raised more questions than it answered, in particular about why employment status affects physical health. Ms. Montez said there was some evidence that having a job offered intangible benefits that could improve health, including a sense of purpose and control in life, as well as providing networks that help to reduce social isolation.

One concern was that people who were not working were jobless because they were sick, but Ms. Montez said they did not find evidence for that.

 Sarah Damaske, an assistant professor of labor studies and employment relations and sociology at Pennsylvania State University, said women who were not in the labor force, a minority now compared to the 1950s, were more likely to have been disadvantaged from the outset, coming from family backgrounds and economic circumstances that tended to produce poorer health outcomes.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/health/joblessness-shortens-lifespan-of-least-educated-white-women-research-says.html?partner=rss&emc=rss