The crowd moves with age
The same altitude curve, with the middle of the population marked at three ages. Watch where the crowd sits as it gets older.
Bars under the curve: the middle half of people (thick) and the middle ninety percent (thin) at each age, with a dot at the median. These are different people at each age, not the same people followed.
Is childhood linked to where people sit?
ELSA asked people in their fifties and older about their childhood: physical abuse, parents fighting very often, a parent who drank, took drugs or was mentally ill, parents separating or a parent dying, long separation from their mother, and severe financial hardship. Their markers were measured about a year later and again over the following decade.
- Overall position does not differ. The share of a person's markers outside the lowest-risk trough is about the same whatever their childhood.
- Inflammation is the exception. With three or more adversities, CRP is more often off the trough, and CRP and fibrinogen rise faster over the following years, after allowing for age, sex and the starting level. Waist and BMI are slightly higher, but not clearly.
- Childhood is recalled late in life, and only people who reached their fifties and came to a nurse visit are included. Many comparisons were made, so single borderline results are not read.
Position on the terrain
Odds of a marker sitting off the trough with three or more adversities against none, adjusted for age and sex, and the share of all markers off the trough by number of adversities.
Change over the following years
Extra yearly change with three or more adversities against none, adjusted for age, sex and starting level.
Born into a famine: CHARLS, China
Exploratory. People born during the Great Chinese Famine, or in early childhood when it struck, against the cohort born just after it, adjusted for age at measurement and sex. Only adjacent birth cohorts are compared directly; the early-childhood group is not adjacent, because the famine-born cohort sits between. Age and birth cohort are nearly the same thing here, so the adjusted change per year is fragile, and many comparisons were made.