Socioeconomic disadvantage in adolescent women and metabolic syndrome in mid-adulthood: An examination of pathways of embodiment in the Northern Swedish Cohort

Abstract

Research indicates that disadvantaged socioeconomic status in childhood or adolescence increases specifically women's risk for developing metabolic syndrome in adulthood. Construing this observation as an expression of embodiment, the present study aims at examining the ‘social chain of risk’ and the ‘reproduction’ hypotheses as pathways of this embodiment. Participants were all women in the Northern Swedish Cohort, a 27-year prospective Swedish cohort, with data collection in 1981 at age 16 years (n = 1083, 506 women), and follow-up at age 21, 30 and 43 (n = 482 women) years. The analytical sample was n = 399 women (79% of the original cohort). Socioeconomic disadvantage was defined as parental manual occupation at age 16, and metabolic syndrome according to standardized criteria at age 43. The social chain of risk was operationalized as accumulated social and material adversities at age 16, 21, 30 and 43 years, and reproductive factors by age at menarche, early childbearing (before age 22), and number of children at age 43. In logistic regression with metabolic syndrome as the outcome, the OR for adolescent socioeconomic status was rendered non-significant and reduced by 21.6% after adjustment for cumulative adversity over the life course. Of the reproductive factors, only age at menarche lead to an OR reduction at all (by 4.1%). Our study suggests that women's embodiment of socioeconomic disadvantage during upbringing is partly explained by adversity over the subsequent life course. Future studies should incorporate the living conditions of women over the life course as a possible pathway whereby early life socioeconomic conditions are embodied.