Routes to healthy ageing: the role of lifecourse patterns

Healthy ageing is a dynamic process, but only a few studies use a longitudinal perspective to investigate the routes to healthy ageing and rarely do so in comparative perspective. This study adopts a holistic multi-domain approach in order to investigate the importance of lifecourse patterns for healthy ageing in Europe, as measured by the Global Activity Limitation Indicator (GALI) and using seven waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Employment and family histories are identified through sequence analysis and used as predictors, together with childhood conditions, in multivariate ordered logistic models covering a sample of 15,952 participants aged 60–65 years. The results showed that ‘non-standard’ employment and family patterns hamper healthy ageing and that these negative effects tend to reinforce each other across the employment and family domains rather than compensating for each other – especially in women. Welfare states, however, moderate these associations. The findings promote the adoption of a lifecourse approach to healthy ageing that considers multiple domains simultaneously and addresses unfavourable life conditions as early as possible in an attempt to mitigate their effects.