Interactions between educational lifecycle and transition to adulthood: A proposal for a new questionnaire.

Analysts who research the effect of education on behaviour related to the transition to adulthood are often limited by information available from censuses and surveys, which generally collect only the highest level of education attained at the time of the interview. Unfortunately, this leads to extreme simplification of people's educational paths and does not allow researchers to know exactly when they completed their studies, whether they did so satisfactorily, or whether they had periods of interruption in their educational cycle. In this paper we therefore investigate the problems deriving from having incomplete educational information when analysing events of transition to adulthood such as leaving the parental home, forming a first union, and having a first child. These needs for more detailed information explain why some surveys have questionnaires that would allow for reconstruction of the complete educational history, but this information is difficult to collect and to use. In order to overcome these difficulties of either the complexity or excessive simplicity of questionnaires on education, we propose a new set of questions. These would permit researchers to provide, with the minimum number of questions, the maximum possible useful information on the level and duration of studies, while also taking into account the most important and relevant interruptions. For the empirical analysis we have used the Fertility and Family Surveys (FFS) for 12 European countries with sufficient data to reconstruct the complete educational cycle.

Correction: Heat-related mortality trends under recent climate warming in Spain: A 36-year observational study.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1002617.].

The contribution of social participation to differences in life expectancy and healthy years among the older population: A comparison between Chile, Costa Rica and Spain.

We study the health trajectories of the population aged over 60, comparing between one European and two Latin American countries (Spain, Chile and Costa Rica) which have similar longevity patterns. Our focus is on functional limitation and mortality risks, considering differences by gender, education and social participation. Data come from national panel surveys (EPS, CRELES, SHARE). Multistate modelling is used to estimate transition probabilities between two health states: healthy to unhealthy, unhealthy to healthy as well as the transition to death from healthy or unhealthy states, to estimate the duration of stay in a specific state (computing healthy and unhealthy life expectancies) and the effect of the selected covariates. Results show that older Costa Ricans have the smallest gender gap in life expectancy but women have a lower healthy life expectancy compared to those in Chile and Spain. Participation in social activities leads to higher healthy life expectancy among the elderly in Costa Rica and Spain, whilst there were no relevant educational differences observed in longevity in the analysed countries. To conclude: despite the different patterns observed in health transitions and survival across the three countries, social participation is associated with greater health and longevity among people of old age, with little effect coming from educational attainment. Public policies should therefore be aimed at reducing unhealthy life years and dependency at advanced ages by promoting more engagement in social activities, especially among vulnerable groups who are more likely to experience impairment from a younger age.

Reversal of the seasonality of temperature-attributable mortality from respiratory diseases in Spain.

A growing number of epidemiological studies have recently assessed temporal variations in vulnerability and/or mortality attributable to hot and cold temperatures. However, the eventual changes in the seasonal distribution of temperature-attributable mortality remain unexplored. Here, we analyse countrywide daily time-series of temperature and mortality counts from respiratory diseases by sex, age group and province of residence during the period 1980-2016 in Spain. We show the complete reversal of the seasonality of temperature-attributable mortality, with a significant shift of the maximum monthly incidence from winter to summer, and the minimum monthly incidence from early and late summer to winter. The reversal in the seasonal distribution of the attributable deaths is not driven by the observed warming in both winter and summer temperatures, but rather by the very large decrease in the risk of death due to cold temperatures and the relatively much smaller reduction due to hot temperatures. We conclude that the projected decrease in the number of moderate and extreme cold days due to climate warming will not contribute to a further reduction of cold-attributable respiratory deaths.

Trends in temperature-related age-specific and sex-specific mortality from cardiovascular diseases in Spain: a national time-series analysis.

BACKGROUND: Climate change driven by human activities has increased annual temperatures in Spain by around 1°C since 1980. However, little is known regarding the extent to which the association between temperature and mortality has changed among the most susceptible population groups as a result of the rapidly warming climate. We aimed to assess trends in temperature-related cardiovascular disease mortality in Spain by sex and age, and we investigated the association between climate warming and changes in the risk of mortality. METHODS: We did a country-wide time-series analysis of 48 provinces in mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands between Jan 1, 1980, and Dec 31, 2016. We extracted daily cardiovascular disease mortality data disaggregated by sex, age, and province from the Spanish National Institute of Statistics database. We also extracted daily mean temperatures from the European Climate Assessment and Dataset project. We applied a quasi-Poisson regression model for each province, controlling for seasonal and long-term trends, to estimate the temporal changes in the province-specific temperature-mortality associations with distributed lag non-linear models. We did a multivariate random-effects meta-analysis to derive the best linear unbiased prediction of the temperature-mortality association and the minimum mortality temperature in each province. Heat-attributable and cold-attributable fractions of death were computed by separating the contributions from days with temperatures warmer and colder than the minimum mortality temperature, respectively. FINDINGS: Between 1980 and 2016, 4 576 600 cardiovascular deaths were recorded. For warm temperatures, the increase in relative risk (RR) of death from cardiovascular diseases was higher for women than men and higher for older individuals (aged ≥90 years) than younger individuals (aged 60-74 years), whereas for cold temperatures, RRs were higher for men than women, with no clear pattern by age group. The heat-attributable fraction of cardiovascular deaths was higher for women in all age groups, and the cold-attributable fraction was larger in men. The heat-attributable fraction increased with age for both sexes, whereas the cold-attributable fraction increased with age for men and decreased for women. Overall minimum mortality temperature increased from 19·5°C between 1980 and 1994 to 20·2°C between 2002 and 2016, which is similar in magnitude to, and occurred in parallel with, the observed mean increase of 0·77°C that occurred in Spain between these two time periods. In general, between 1980 and 2016, the risk and attributable fraction of cardiovascular deaths due to warm and cold temperatures decreased for men and women across all age groups. For all the age groups combined, between 1980-94 and 2002-16, the heat-attributable fraction decreased by -42·06% (95% empirical CI -44·39 to -41·06) for men and -36·64% (-36·70 to -36·04) for women, whereas the cold-attributable fraction was reduced by -30·23% (-30·34 to -30·05) for men and -44·87% (-46·77 to -42·94) for women. INTERPRETATION: In Spain, the observed warming of the climate has occurred in parallel with substantial adaptation to both high and low temperatures. The reduction in the RR and the attributable fraction associated with heat would be compatible with an adaptive response specifically addressing the negative consequences of climate change. Nevertheless, the simultaneous reduction in the RR and attributable fraction of cold temperatures also highlights the importance of more general factors such as socioeconomic development, increased life expectancy and quality, and improved health-care services in the country. FUNDING: None.

Heat-related mortality trends under recent climate warming in Spain: A 36-year observational study.

BACKGROUND: Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased summer temperatures in Spain by nearly one degree Celsius on average between 1980 and 2015. However, little is known about the extent to which the association between heat and human mortality has been modified. We here investigate whether the observed warming has been associated with an upward trend in excess mortality attributable to heat or, on the contrary, a decrease in the vulnerability to heat has contributed to a reduction of the mortality burden. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We analysed a dataset from 47 major cities in Spain for the summer months between 1980 and 2015, which included daily temperatures and 554,491 deaths from circulatory and respiratory causes, by sex. We applied standard quasi-Poisson regression models, controlling for seasonality and long-term trends, and estimated the temporal variation in heat-related mortality with time-varying distributed lag nonlinear models (DLNMs). Results pointed to a reduction in the relative risks of cause-specific and cause-sex mortality across the whole range of summer temperatures. These reductions in turn explained the observed downward trends in heat-attributable deaths, with the only exceptions of respiratory diseases for women and both sexes together. The heat-attributable deaths were consistently higher in women than in men for both circulatory and respiratory causes. The main limitation of our study is that we were not able to account for air pollution in the models because of data unavailability. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the summer warming observed in Spain between 1980 and 2015, the decline in the vulnerability of the population has contributed to a general downward trend in overall heat-attributable mortality. This reduction occurred in parallel with a decline in the vulnerability difference between men and women for circulatory and cardiorespiratory mortality. Despite these advances, the risk of death remained high for respiratory diseases, and particularly in women.