Around The Globe

Self-Rated Health and Mortality

Would you say your health is excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor? How is it compared to the health of other people your age? Your beliefs may affect your health as much as behaviors like relaxation and medical compliance. Several studies have shown that people in the United States who rate their own health as poor are more likely to die over the next six years than other people who are just as physically healthy. Appels et al. (1996) surveyed men aged forty-five to sixty years old in Lithuania and the Netherlands to see if the effect holds for other cultures.

After controlling for health-risk factors like smoking and obesity, Dutch men who rated their own health as poor were eighty percent more likely to die over the next ten years than others; there was no effect for Lithuanians. However, rating yourself as being less healthy than other people your age increased the risk of dying for both the Lithuanian and Dutch men, by twenty percent and fifty-four percent respectively. If health psychologists could cure pessimism, lives around the world could be prolonged.