Researchers affiliated with the Resilience in Survivors of Hurricane Katrina (RISK) project have published a paper that takes a look at the health impacts of being displaced into a gentrified neighborhood. The researchers did not find evidence of significant effects on BMI, self-rated health, or psychological distress. Photo: Ted Eytan on Flickr
Harvard Pop Center Director Lisa Berkman, PhD, and her colleagues have published a study that has found a connection between higher levels of the sex hormone dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and lower levels of depression when analyzing hair samples of over 2,000 women in rural India. Learn more about how other sex hormones, such as testosterone and progesterone, may factor into depressive and anxiety disorders. Other authors include: Andreas Walther, C. Tsao,…
Continue reading “Untangling depression and anxiety using hair samples in India”
Researchers affiliated with the Harvard Pop Center, including Director Lisa Berkman, have published a study that looks at the impact of the Medicaid expansion on subjective well-being among low-income and general adult U.S. populations. Self-perceived measures of happiness, sadness, worry, stress, and life satisfaction did not appear to be impacted by the increased access to healthcare among the low-income sector or by a spill-over effect in the general population. The…
Lisa Berkman shares her thoughts with CNN on how having strong social connections can help us weather the challenges of aging. Learn more in this news item by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
A study published in Preventive Medicine has found that an authoritative parenting style (one that blends both warmth and control) is associated with healthier mid-life weight among offspring. Harvard Pop Center Director Lisa Berkman, and faculty members Ichiro Kawachi and Laura Kubzansky, are among the authors*. *Other authors include: lead author Ying Chen and Claudia Trudel-Fitzgerald.
In the U.S., as in many industrialized nations, policymakers have embraced the notion that most individuals can (and should) work longer. But changes across generations in health, family, and work may make it hard for substantial sections of the U.S. population to continue to work into their 60s or beyond. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Professor Lisa Berkman and Harvard Pop Center postdoctoral fellow Beth Truesdale will…
A new study published in the BMJ Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health examined the long-term health impacts of a policy enacted in France that extended compulsory education by two years. Lead author Emilie Courtin, PhD, a current Harvard Bell Fellow, along with Harvard Pop Center Director Lisa Berkman, and faculty members Mauricio Avendano and Maria Glymour and other colleagues, found that while the reform was linked to improved cognitive…
Harvard Bell Fellow Emilie Courtin, PhD, is lead author on a study published in Social Science & Medicine that reveals that when mandatory length of education among teenagers in France was raised from age 14 to 16 by a government policy, those students who were from socioeconomically disadvantaged families were later found to have higher blood pressure and white blood cell counts in adulthood. Harvard Pop Center Director Lisa Berkman and faculty…
Continue reading “When is more education not necessarily better for health?”
A study published by HAALSI researchers, including recent Harvard Bell Fellow Lindsay Kobayashi, Pop Center Director Lisa Berkman, and faculty members S V Subramanian (Subu), Kathleen Kahn, and Stephen Tollman, finds that while short stature may be a risk factor for cognitive function among older adults living in South Africa, education was found to negate the relationship between height disparity and cognitive function.
A team of researchers, including collaborator and Harvard Pop Center Director Lisa Berkman, PhD, has developed a multidimensional index that measures how well a country is handling the transition to having an increasingly larger proportion of older adults by evaluating status across five domains. The results, published in PNAS, indicate that while the U.S. scored well in the areas of productivity and engagement, the country ranked near the bottom in equity.