Ingemar Kåreholt

ARN-J (Aging Research Network - Jönköping)

I am professor in Gerontology, working at the Institute of Gerontology here at Jönköping University a bit more than half of my time. I also work at Aging Research Center, Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University.

My research interests are broad and cover nearly all aspects of aging and the situation in old age. Examples of research areas that I have been involved in during 2014-2015 are:

¬Patterns of alcohol drinking in old age and how it relates to mortality risk.

–Health trends in the population.

–Leadership behaviors and psychosocial working conditions in nursing homes and home help services.

–Trends in survival after referral to nursing homes.

–Mortality risk after dementia diagnoses. Here we have analyses the effect of BMI (Body Mass Index), type of dementia and what causes of deaths that are most common.

–Health care utilization during the last years of life.

–Life-style factors associated to risk of dementia and cognitive problems.

–The balance between formal and informal care

Presently I’m leading a project about working conditions before retirement age and how it is associated to health and physical functioning in old age (69 years and older). We study measures of socioeconomic position and psychosocial working conditions in ages 53-64 and how these factors associates to health, wellbeing and physical functioning in old age (age 76-89 years).

Socioeconomic position are measures of the status and position in the society. In this study we measure socioeconomic position with years of education, income, cash margin, social class based on occupation, and an index (a way of combining the separate measures) based on all measures. Cash margin is based on questions about the possibility to raise a specific amount of money (10,000 SEK in 1991) and divided into three categories, no/yes, with problem/yes, from own account or from the family. Social class is categorized as unskilled manual worker, skilled manual, lower non-manual, and higher non-manual worker.

Working conditions studied are job control (how much you can control your work situation), work related stress, job strain (high job strain is having a job with much work related stress and low control), and how intellectually demanding your work is – the latter is categorized as intellectually demanding in general, regarding handling information, and dealing with people.

Some main findings from the project:

–Having low socioeconomic position, low job control or less intellectually stimulating work in terms of working with information and people have strong associations (statistically significant) to all three physical function in old age. We measure physical functioning as self-reported mobility (ability to walk 100 m, walk stairs, and run 100 m), and tests of general physical functioning and lung function. When working conditions and socioeconomic position are analyzed together, job control was the factor that had the strongest association to physical functioning in old age. The conclusion from this is that modification in the degree of control at work might be a possible way to increase physical functioning in old age.

–Having an intellectually stimulating work is associated to lower risk of psychological problems in old age.

–Having an intellectually stimulating work or intellectually stimulation leisure time activities are associated to lower risk of cognitive problems in old age. You only need either intellectually stimulating work or intellectually stimulating leisure time activities to have lower risk of cognitive problems.

– Work related stress is associated with higher likelihood of serious health problems among women but lower likelihood of serious health problems among men. Having control over the work situation are associated with less serious health problems. The strongest association in this study was between high job strain (low control+much work related stress) and having several kind of severe health problems.

–Income is the measure of socioeconomic position that has the strongest association to both psychological problems and mobility problems – high income -> less problems.

–Sense of coherence measures to what extent a person finds life meaningful, manageable, and comprehensible. High job strain are relatively strongly associated to higher risk of mortality in the presence of low sense of coherence, whereas the work stress-mortality link was less strong in the presence of high sense of coherence, indicating that high sense of coherence served as a buffer for the negative effects of work-related stress on risk of mortality.