Self-perceived health and longevity: do dynamics matter?

Researchers can rely on either on retrospectively reported or on prospectively measured health changes to identify and quantify recent changes in respondents’ health status. The two methods typically do not provide the same answers. This paper compares the criterion validity of prospective versus retrospective measures of health changes by investigating their predictive power for subsequent mortality. Methods: Data are drawn from the GLOBE study, a prospective cohort study conducted in the Netherlands. We compare the ability of changes in self assessed health (SAH) - reported retrospectively and measured prospectively for 1991, 1993 and 1995 - to predict mortality until 2004. Proportional hazard models with frailty are used to model the relationships between health changes and mortality, before and after controlling for a set of pre-existing chronic conditions and the onset of new chronic diseases.