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Intertwining Courses of Functional Status and Subjective Health Among Older Japanese

¹ School of Public Health and ² Institute of Gerontology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
³ School of Public Health, University at Albany, State University of New York, Rensselaer, New York.
⁴ Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, Japan.

Address correspondence to Jersey Liang, Department of Health Management and Policy, University of Michigan School of Public Health, 1420 Washington Heights, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2029. E-mail: jliang{at}umich.edu

Objectives. We sought to depict how trajectories of functional status are related to the average changes in self-rated health and its underlying trajectories.

Methods. Data came from a five-wave panel study of a national sample of 2,200 Japanese older adults between 1987 and 1999. We employed hierarchical linear models and multinomial logistic regression to depict the interrelationships among patterns of temporal change in functional status and self-rated health.

Results. Trajectories of functional status were associated with the average age-related changes in subjective health (i.e., linear and nonlinear slopes). Furthermore, there were significant correlations between the courses of functional health and those of self-rated health. Finally, recovery from poor self-rated health was characterized by having poor health and functional ability at baseline.

Discussion. Researchers can generalize prior observations of the association between functional status and subjective health at one or more points in time to their long-term trajectories. These findings provide further insights into understanding the dynamics between two key dimensions of health among older adults in Japan.