Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CARDIOLOGY
Volume 258, Issue -, Pages 289-294Publisher
ELSEVIER IRELAND LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijcard.2018.01.088
Keywords
Cardiovascular disorders; Health behaviors; Socioeconomic status; Preventive medicine
Categories
Funding
- Academy of Finland [126925, 121584, 124282, 129378, 117787, 41071, 275595]
- Social Insurance Institution of Finland
- Kuopio University Hospital Medical Fund
- Juho Vainio Foundation
- Paavo Nurmi Foundation
- Finnish Foundation of Cardiovascular Research
- TYKS Foundation
- Finnish Cultural Foundation
- Sigrid Juselius Foundation
- Yrjo Jahnsson Foundation
- Tampere University Hospital Medical Fund
- Turku University Hospital Medical Fund
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Background: Differences in health behaviors partly explain the socioeconomic gap in cardiovascular health. We prospectively examined the association between childhood socioeconomic status (SES) and lifestyle factors in adulthood, and the difference of lifestyle factors according to childhood SES in multiple time points from childhood to adulthood. Methods and results: The sample comprised 3453 participants aged 3-18 years at baseline (1980) from the longitudinal Young Finns Study. The participants were followed up for 31 years (N = 1675-1930). SES in childhood was characterized as reported annual family income and classified on an 8-point scale. Diet, smoking, alcohol intake and physical activity were used as adult and life course lifestyle factors. Higher childhood SES predicted a healthier diet in adulthood in terms of lower consumption of meat (beta +/- SE -3.6 +/- 0.99, p < 0.001), higher consumption of fish (1.1 +/- 0.5, p = 0.04) and higher diet score (0.14 +/- 0.044, p = 0.01). Childhood SES was also directly associated with physical activity index (0.059 +/- 0.023, p = 0.009) and inversely with the risk of being a smoker (RR 0.90 95%CI 0.85-0.95, p < 0.001) and the amount of pack years (-0.47 +/- 0.18, p = 0.01). Life course level of smoking was significantly higher and physical activity index lower among those below the median childhood SES when compared with those above the median SES. Conclusions: These results show that childhood SES associates with several lifestyle factors 31 years later in adulthood. Therefore, attention could be paid to lifestyle behaviors of children of low SES families to promote cardiovascular health. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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