Measuring premature and cumulative family member bereavement: Racial disparities and later mortality risk

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Chang, Michelle; Robles, Theodore F.
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-15256
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2313600122
• 发表日期: 2025-06-17
• 关键词: prolonged grief disorder; HEALTH; OPPORTUNITIES; epidemiology; Covid-19; deaths; stress

摘要

Though racial disparities in shortened life expectancy have been well established, racial disparities in the burden of bereavement after such premature deaths are severely understudied. This is, in part, due to a lack of measurement tools for characterizing lifetime exposure to loss. We propose three indices that simultaneously quantify premature and cumulative lifetime loss-two typically unmeasured dimensions of loss. Using a longitudinal US sample of 27,985 participants from the Health and Retirement Study (1992 to 2020) who experienced at least one lifetime loss, hierarchical linear models accounting for participants nested within households showed that Black participants and Native American participants had higher premature and cumulative burden of family member loss over the lifetime than all other racial groups across all three indices. These effects remained for Black participants after controlling for covariates such as parental education, household size, and years in the study. Second, we found that loss burden at study enrollment prospectively related to all-cause mortality. Depending on prematurity, each additional loss related to higher odds of dying during the study period after controlling for covariates such as chronic health conditions. Together, our work leverages prospective, longitudinal methodologies to identify racial disparities in exposure to earlier and repeated death and its impact on mortality among the bereaved. The proposed measurement approach has future applications for understanding how loss exposure-both too soon and too much-predicts poor health and earlier mortality.