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2024 (English)In: Social Science and Medicine, ISSN 0277-9536, E-ISSN 1873-5347, Vol. 348, article id 116787Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Objective: Using a large longitudinal sample of adults from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, the present study extended a recently developed hierarchical model to determine how best to model the accumulation of stressors, and to determine whether the rate of change in stressors or traditional composite scores of stressors are stronger predictors of health outcomes.
Method: We used factor analysis to estimate a stress-factor score and then, to operationalize the accumulation of stressors we examined five approaches to aggregating information about repeated exposures to multiple stressors. The predictive validity of these approaches was then assessed in relation to different health outcomes.
Results: The prediction of chronic conditions, body mass index, difficulty with activities of daily living, executive function, and episodic memory later in life was strongest when the accumulation of stressors was modeled using total area under the curve (AUC) of estimated factor scores, compared to composite scores that have traditionally been used in studies of cumulative stress, as well as linear rates of change.
Conclusions: Like endogenous, biological markers of stress reactivity, AUC for individual trajectories of self-reported stressors shows promise as a data reduction technique to model the accumulation of stressors in longitudinal studies. Overall, our results indicate that considering different quantitative models is critical to understanding the sequelae and predictive power of psychosocial stressors from midlife to late adulthood.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Elsevier, 2024
Keywords
Area under the curve; Chronic stressors; Cumulative stress; Executive function; Health; Memory
National Category
Occupational Health and Environmental Health
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-203534 (URN)10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116787 (DOI)001219648500001 ()38547807 (PubMedID)2-s2.0-85189009421 (Scopus ID)
Funder
NIH (National Institutes of Health), 1L60AG074424-01
Note
Funding Agencies|National Institute of Health [1L60AG074424-01]
2024-05-162024-05-162024-05-31