Socio-economic determinants of anthropometric measures of abdominal adiposity among older people in England

Abstract

Abstract Objective: to look into the socio-economic determinants of levels of three anthropometric measures of abdominal adiposity among older people in England -body mass index, waist circumference (WC), and waist-hip ratio (WHR)- and of changes along two health risk classifications: the World Health Organisation classification based on BMI levels and the WHO combined classification based on BMI and waist circumference measurements. Design: quantile regression and multinomial analysis using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), wave 2 (2004-05) and wave 4 (2008-09) Results: The quantile analysis on levels led to disparate results depending on the wave, which would question results previously published based on only one wave. However, we found that age tends to present an inverse U-shaped relationship with BMI and WC, smoking is negatively associated with BMI and positively with WC and WHR, alcohol consumption is negatively associated with BMI and WC levels, net total wealth is negatively related with the three anthropometric measures, educational attainment is negatively associated with each measure, and depression is positively associated with each measure. The multinomial analysis found that living in a larger household size increases the likelihood of becoming or remaining unhealthy irrespective of which classification we used. Furthermore, using the BMI-based categorisation, the initial category is highly relevant as a predictor of the category four years later and alcohol consumption would be positively associated with being or becoming obese. From the combined BMI-WC categorisation, we found that net total wealth would be negatively associated with becoming or remaining unhealthy whereas depression is a significant predictor of becoming or remaining unhealthy.