June 2007
Statistics don't lie; health tends
to favor certain groups
Helen and Jack retired a few years ago and moved to Nevada. Jack had been head of the claims department for an insurance company. Helen used to be a marketing executive. They sold their home in Southern California and ended up with enough equity in it to buy two homes in a new 55+ housing development in Las Vegas. (They bought only one.) They are both in reasonably good health, although Jack takes medication to control his high blood pressure.
Fernando and Maria Elena are about the same age as Helen and Jack, but they have lived in Clark County most of their lives. Fernando retired after working for the post office for 30 years. He now has a part-time job supervising groundskeepers at one the casinos. She was a homemaker but now works as an office assistant with the school district. They lived in a rental house for most of their married lives and now reside with one of their sons and his wife. Both are dealing with chronic health conditions. A smoker for more than 30 years, Fernando has bronchitis. Maria Elena is overweight and has developed Type 2 diabetes.
Helen and Jack and Fernando and Maria Elena aren't real people. But their situations illustrate genuine correlations involving elders of different backgrounds. Helen and Jack are affluent, highly educated Anglo professionals. Fernando and Maria Elena represent many working-class Latino elders with no postsecondary education. As data compiled for the new Elders Count Nevada project illustrate, the wealthier and better-educated seniors are, the healthier they tend to be. White elders are, on average, healthier and live longer than minorities. This holds true both nationally and in Nevada.
Elders Count Nevada is a program created by the University of Nevada, Reno Sanford Center for Aging with financial support from the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services. It's designed to gather statistical information on seniors, the way the national Kids Count program does with children.
The goal of both programs is to give public officials and others a realistic picture of conditions today so they can allocate resources efficiently and plan better for the future. Our hope at the Sanford Center for Aging is that Elders Count will provide a biennial “report card” to Nevada officials and will expand nationally like Kids Count, although the initial grant from the state was for one year, ending June 30, 2007.
The initial Elders Count found that, in both Nevada and the United States as a whole, the leading cause of death is chronic disease: cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes. In the United States, chronic diseases account for 7 out of every 10 deaths.
Here, in order, are the top causes of death for adults 65 and older in Nevada from 2003: heart disease, chronic lower-respiratory diseases, stroke, kidney disease, pneumonia and influenza, Alzheimer's disease, septicemia (blood poisoning), diabetes.
Regrettably, chronic diseases are not only the most prevalent and costly of all health problems, they're the most preventable. Which is a good reason for public health officials (not to mention the public) to pay attention to Elders Count.
Most people know that women live longer than men - an average of 5.4 years. But people are less aware of the correlations between health and race. In a 2004 survey, for example, 87 percent of white adults reported their health as good to excellent. The figure was only 69 percent for Hispanics.
Differences in wealth continue to persist between whites and many minority groups, and the senior population is no exception. In 2003 the national median household net worth for whites 65 or older was $215,000. For blacks in the same age group, it was a paltry $26,300. Net worth is defined as total value of all assets (savings, real estate equity, stocks/bonds, etc.) minus all outstanding debt or liabilities.
Some other findings from Elders Count:
- Nationally, people 65 and older with some college or a college degree have a median household net worth of $376,500, compared with $59,500 for an older adult without a high school diploma.
- In 2005, Nevada ranked 40th among states in household net worth at $45,551. The good news is that a smaller share of Nevada's seniors (7 percent) lived at or below the poverty line than was the case nationally (10 percent).
- U.S. children born in 2000 were expected to live 76.9 years on average, compared with an average life expectancy of 75.9 for those in Nevada. Our state's traditionally higher rates of drinking and smoking play a role in the deficit. • In 2000, the United States ranked 24th in life expectancy among wealthy nations, likely because we have higher rates of heart disease and cancer from obesity and tobacco use. There's also the HIV epidemic and extremely poor health in some subpopulations, including American Indians, rural areas, and among inner-city youths. Nevada is challenged with all of those health concerns. This is only a small sample of the information contained in two sections (Economics and Health Status) of Elders Count Nevada. The final report will also detail demographics, health risks and
behaviors, and health-care resources. We expect to begin distributing Elders Count Nevada in July to legislators, other key decisionmakers and anyone else interested in improving the health of Nevada's elders. For your own copy, contact Teresa Sacks, program director, at 784- 1612. The report also will be available on the Sanford Center for Aging website, www.unr.edu/sanford/programs/elders_count.
(Larry Weiss is director of University of Nevada, Reno Sanford Center for Aging and an adjunct associate professor of medicine. was a delegate to the 2005 White House Conference on Aging, serves on the National Council on Aging Leadership Council, and is a past president of the Nevada Public Health Foundation Board.)