Abstract
As China is now facing the severe challenge of rapid population ageing, the health behaviors in Chinese elderly people are of great significance for realizing the goal of “Healthy Ageing” and the construction of a “Healthy China”. Little is known about the evolutionary trends of health behaviors in the Chinese elderly and about the factors influencing these trends; thus, the purposes of this paper are: (1) To describe the classes and evolutionary trends of health behaviors in the Chinese elderly; and (2) to explore the factors that influence the changes in the health behaviors in the elderly in China. Latent class analysis (LCA) is applied in this study to analyze the classes of health behaviors in the Chinese elderly. Growth mixture modelling (GMM) is employed to describe the evolutionary trends of the health behaviors in elderly people in China. In addition, the Bivariate analysis model is adopted to identify the influencing factors of the evolution of health behaviors. The data were derived from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) from 2005 to 2014. The results reveal that the health behaviors in the Chinese elderly can be grouped into five classes: Negative, relatively negative, fair, relatively positive, and positive. Approximately 77.2% of the health behaviors in the Chinese elderly have the characteristics of “modified”, with a positive tendency. Moreover, approximately 22.8% of the health behaviors in Chinese elderly people have the characteristics of “non-modified”, with a negative tendency or remaining unchanged. The evolution of the health behaviors in the elderly in China is more affected by economic factors such as timely medical treatment during childhood, pension, occupations before the age of 60 and family income, as well as by self-rated health (SRH) and demographic characteristics such as household registration, age, and education level. Hence, various possible interventions should be made to improve the health behaviors in elderly people.
Highlights
Population ageing is one of the major challenges faced by China in this century
The Latent class analysis (LCA) fit indexes of each wave survey demonstrates that, among the manifest health behaviors in all four waves, there exists the latent variable of health behaviors in the Chinese elderly
It is acknowledged that to determine the evolutionary trends of the health behaviors in the elderly based only on the classes at the beginning and end of the wave may be biased, as this approach does not consider the adjustment of health behaviors over the course of the decade
Summary
In 2018, the number of elderly people over the age of 60 in China had reached 249 million, accounting for 17.9% of the total population. In comparison with the number of elderly people in China when it first became an ageing society in 1999, the net increase is approximately 120 million [1]. It is estimated that by 2050, the number of elderly people over the age of 60 in China will exceed 450 million, with a proportion of the total population over 30% [2]. The World Health Organization points out that the increase in life expectancy rather than the improvement in quality of life is of no value, and healthy life expectancy is. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 1687; doi:10.3390/ijerph16101687 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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