Community Studies Reporting Association between Self-Rated Health and Mortality

The following table amends and updates the summary table of mortality studies published in 1997 (Idler and Benyamini 1997). To locate additional studies, we searched Medline using the terms self-rated health, self-rating/s of health, self-assessment/s of health, self-assessed health, self-evaluated health, perception/s of health, perceived health, self-evaluation/s of health, subjective assessment/s of health, subjective health, selfreported health, and self-reports of health and crossed these terms with mortality, survival, and deaths. Additional studies not reporting these terms in their abstracts were identified through careful monitoring of the literature. Articles identified with this process were eliminated if they were not in English, if the study population was not a representative community sample, or if the estimate of the effect of self-rated health on mortality was not adjusted for a set of health status covariates. With these restrictions, we identified 19 additional studies for the period 1995 to 1998. The studies in Table 1 are presented chronologically. They report secondary analyses of large data sets, use increasingly sophisticated statistical methods, and adjust for comprehensive sets of health status covariates. The association of poor self-ratings of health with higher risk of mortality is consistent; in just 2 of the 19 studies there were no effects of self-rated health for either men or women. In most of its content, the table presented here is like the 1997 table. The data sources are international, 15 of the 19 have elderly samples, and the health status covariates almost always include activities of daily living