Jennifer B Dowd
Biographic Data
| ID | 122665 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer B Dowd |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer B |
| FAMILY NAME | Dowd |
| SIGNATURE | DOWD J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2006-5656 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 212 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Why is life expectancy in England & Wales falling behind? A cause-of-death decomposition approach
Life expectancy in England & Wales has diverged from that of its high-income peers since 2011, raising concerns that the country may become an international laggard like the United States (US). Using the contour method, we decompose gaps in life expectancy between England & Wales and 20 individual high-income countries for males and females in 2019 into: (a) pre-existing differences in age- and cause-specific death rates in 2011; and (b) divergin…
Chronic health conditions and health-related economic inactivity in midlife: Evidence from the 1958 and 1970 British birth cohorts
Background Health-related economic inactivity is a growing concern in the United Kingdom but little is known about how the relationship between health and work participation has changed across cohorts. Methods We used data from two British birth cohorts born in 1958 (National Child Development Study, n = 9,761) and 1970 (British Cohort Study, n = 7,336). We examined how self-reported chronic health conditions at age 42 (longstanding illness, obes…
The generational health drift: A systematic review of evidence from the British birth cohort studies
Progress Stalled? The Uncertain Future of Mortality in High-Income Countries
Steady and significant improvements in life expectancy have been a bright spot for human progress for the last century or more. Recently, this success has shown signs of faltering in some high-income countries, where mortality improvements have slowed or even reversed since the early 2010s. Combined with the large mortality shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, guaranteed forward progress feels less certain. We review mortality trends in high-income co…
Cohort Differences in Physical Health and Disability in the United States and Europe
In all regions, we found evidence for worsening health across cohorts, particularly for those born since 1945. While more chronic disease in younger cohorts need not necessarily translate to worse quality of life or higher rates of functional limitation, there is some suggestion that worsening chronic disease morbidity may be spilling over into worsening disability
Older Adults in the United States Have Worse Cardiometabolic Health Compared to England
Explanations for lagging life expectancy in the United States compared to other high-income countries have focused largely on "deaths of despair," but attention has also shifted to the role of stalling improvements in cardiovascular disease and the obesity epidemic. Using harmonized data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study and English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, we assess differences in self-reported and objective measures of health, amon…
Life expectancy changes since Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented rise in mortality that translated into life expectancy losses around the world, with only a few exceptions. We estimate life expectancy changes in 29 countries since 2020 (including most of Europe, the United States and Chile), attribute them to mortality changes by age group and compare them with historic life expectancy shocks. Our results show divergence in mortality impacts of the pandemic in 2…
Estimating the burden of the Covid-19 pandemic on mortality, life expectancy and lifespan inequality in England and Wales: A population-level analysis
BACKGROUND: Deaths directly linked to COVID-19 infection may be misclassified, and the pandemic may have indirectly affected other causes of death. To overcome these measurement challenges, we estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality, life expectancy and lifespan inequality from week 10 of 2020, when the first COVID-19 death was registered, to week 47 ending 20 November 2020 in England and Wales through an analysis of excess mort…
Reconstructing Sociogenomics Research: Dismantling Biological Race and Genetic Essentialism Narratives
We detail the implications of sociogenomics for social determinants research. We focus on education and race because of how early twentieth-century scientific eugenic thinking facilitated a range of racist and eugenic policies, most of which helped justify and pattern racial and educational morbidity and mortality disparities that remain today, and are central to sociological research. Consequently, we detail the implications of sociogenomics res…
Demographic science aids in understanding the spread and fatality rates of Covid-19
Governments around the world must rapidly mobilize and make difficult policy decisions to mitigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Because deaths have been concentrated at older ages, we highlight the important role of demography, particularly, how the age structure of a population may help explain differences in fatality rates across countries and how transmission unfolds. We examine the role of age structure in deaths thus far…
Life Course Socioeconomic Disadvantage and the Aging Immune System: Findings From the Health and Retirement Study
CMV IgG levels in older adults are associated with both early-life and adult SES. Life course socioeconomic disadvantage may contribute to disparities in immunological aging
Social network-based distancing strategies to flatten the Covid-19 curve in a post-lockdown world
Social distancing and isolation have been widely introduced to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. Adverse social, psychological and economic consequences of a complete or near-complete lockdown demand the development of more moderate contact-reduction policies. Adopting a social network approach, we evaluate the effectiveness of three distancing strategies designed to keep the curve flat and aid compliance in a post-lockdown world. These are: limitin…
Longer schooling but not better off? A quasi-experimental study of the effect of compulsory schooling on biomarkers in France
Less schooling is associated with increased biological risks for chronic disease, but whether increasing years of schooling through policy interventions reduces these risks remains unclear. We examine the effect of a major education reform introduced in 1959 that raised the minimum school leaving age from 14 to 16 years in France, offering a unique natural experiment. We assess the causal impact of increased schooling duration on 16 biomarkers of…
Social and population health science approaches to understand the human microbiome
Income and Markers of Immunological Cellular Aging
OBJECTIVE: Socioeconomic disadvantage may contribute to poor health through immune-related biological mechanisms. We examined the associations between socioeconomic status, as measured by annual household income, and T-cell markers of aging, including the ratios of CD4 and CD8 effector cells to naïve cells (E/N ratio) and the CD4/CD8 T-cell ratio. We hypothesized that participants with a lower income would have higher E/N ratios and lower CD4/CD8…
Early life socioeconomic position and immune response to persistent infections among elderly Latinos
The Long Arm of Adolescent Health Among Men and Women: Does Attained Status Explain Its Association with Mid-Adulthood Health
Life Expectancy and Education
AffiliationsJennifer Beam Dowd is with Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health and the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research, New York, NY. Amar Hamoudi is with the Sanford School of Public Policy and Duke Population Research Institute, Duke University, Durham. NC
Race/ethnic and socioeconomic differences in stress and immune function in The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health
Stress and immune function may be important mediators of the strong association between social factors and health over the life course, but previous studies have lacked the data to fully explore these links in a population-based sample. This study utilizes data from Waves I-IV of the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to test the associations of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) with levels of perceived…
Housing Wealth, Psychological Well-being, and Cognitive Functioning of Older Americans
Housing market volatility may influence the psychological and cognitive health of older adults, highlighting potential health consequences of pro-home ownership policies, which may be especially important in light of recent dramatic housing price declines
Physical Health Effects of the Housing Boom: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From the Health and Retirement Study
Objectives. We examined the impact of the dramatic increases in housing prices in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s on physical health outcomes among a representative sample of middle-aged and older Americans. Methods. Using a quasi-experimental design, we exploited geographic and time variation in housing prices using third-party valuation estimates of median single-family detached houses from 1988 to 2007 in each of 2400 zip codes …
Whiners, deniers, and self-rated health: What are the implications for measuring health inequalities? A commentary on Layes, et al
Neighborhood-level stressors, social support, and diurnal patterns of cortisol: The Chicago Community Adult Health Study
Childhood obesity and human capital accumulation
Reliability of Self-rated Health in US Adults
General self-rated health (SRH) is widely used to study trends and inequalities in population health. Recently, there has been an increased interest in understanding the measurement properties of SRH. This study evaluated for the first time the test-retest reliability of SRH among US adults. Analyses were based on a nationally representative sample of 9,235 adults interviewed in the 2005-2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHAN…
Does Self-reported Health Bias the Measurement of Health Inequalities in U.S. Adults? Evidence Using Anchoring Vignettes From the Health and Retirement Study
These results suggest caution in relying on self-reported health measures to quantify and explain health disparities by socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity/ethnicity in the United States. The findings support expansion of the use of anchoring vignettes to properly account for reporting differences in self-reports of health
Neighborhood-level stressors, social support, and diurnal patterns of cortisol: The Chicago Community Adult Health Study
Early origins of health disparities: Burden of infection, health, and socioeconomic status in U.S. children
Life expectancy changes since Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented rise in mortality that translated into life expectancy losses around the world, with only a few exceptions. We estimate life expectancy changes in 29 countries since 2020 (including most of Europe, the United States and Chile), attribute them to mortality changes by age group and compare them with historic life expectancy shocks. Our results show divergence in mortality impacts of the pandemic in 2…
Do biomarkers of stress mediate the relation between socioeconomic status and health
Objectives: To test the relation between socioeconomic status (SES) and biomarkers of chronic stress, including basal cortisol, and to test whether these biomarkers account for the relation between SES and health outcomes. Design: Cross sectional study using data from the 2000 social and environmental biomarkers of aging study (SEBAS). Setting: Taiwan. Participants: Nationally representative sample of 972 men and women aged 54 and older. Main out…
Social network-based distancing strategies to flatten the Covid-19 curve in a post-lockdown world
Social distancing and isolation have been widely introduced to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. Adverse social, psychological and economic consequences of a complete or near-complete lockdown demand the development of more moderate contact-reduction policies. Adopting a social network approach, we evaluate the effectiveness of three distancing strategies designed to keep the curve flat and aid compliance in a post-lockdown world. These are: limitin…
Race/ethnic and socioeconomic differences in stress and immune function in The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health
Stress and immune function may be important mediators of the strong association between social factors and health over the life course, but previous studies have lacked the data to fully explore these links in a population-based sample. This study utilizes data from Waves I-IV of the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to test the associations of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) with levels of perceived…
Housing Wealth, Psychological Well-being, and Cognitive Functioning of Older Americans
Housing market volatility may influence the psychological and cognitive health of older adults, highlighting potential health consequences of pro-home ownership policies, which may be especially important in light of recent dramatic housing price declines
Estimating the burden of the Covid-19 pandemic on mortality, life expectancy and lifespan inequality in England and Wales: A population-level analysis
BACKGROUND: Deaths directly linked to COVID-19 infection may be misclassified, and the pandemic may have indirectly affected other causes of death. To overcome these measurement challenges, we estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality, life expectancy and lifespan inequality from week 10 of 2020, when the first COVID-19 death was registered, to week 47 ending 20 November 2020 in England and Wales through an analysis of excess mort…
Cohort Differences in Physical Health and Disability in the United States and Europe
In all regions, we found evidence for worsening health across cohorts, particularly for those born since 1945. While more chronic disease in younger cohorts need not necessarily translate to worse quality of life or higher rates of functional limitation, there is some suggestion that worsening chronic disease morbidity may be spilling over into worsening disability
Early life socioeconomic position and immune response to persistent infections among elderly Latinos
The Long Arm of Adolescent Health Among Men and Women: Does Attained Status Explain Its Association with Mid-Adulthood Health
Early childhood origins of the income/health gradient: The role of maternal health behaviors
Reconstructing Sociogenomics Research: Dismantling Biological Race and Genetic Essentialism Narratives
We detail the implications of sociogenomics for social determinants research. We focus on education and race because of how early twentieth-century scientific eugenic thinking facilitated a range of racist and eugenic policies, most of which helped justify and pattern racial and educational morbidity and mortality disparities that remain today, and are central to sociological research. Consequently, we detail the implications of sociogenomics res…
Childhood obesity and human capital accumulation
Older Adults in the United States Have Worse Cardiometabolic Health Compared to England
Explanations for lagging life expectancy in the United States compared to other high-income countries have focused largely on "deaths of despair," but attention has also shifted to the role of stalling improvements in cardiovascular disease and the obesity epidemic. Using harmonized data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study and English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, we assess differences in self-reported and objective measures of health, amon…
Life Course Socioeconomic Disadvantage and the Aging Immune System: Findings From the Health and Retirement Study
CMV IgG levels in older adults are associated with both early-life and adult SES. Life course socioeconomic disadvantage may contribute to disparities in immunological aging
Longer schooling but not better off? A quasi-experimental study of the effect of compulsory schooling on biomarkers in France
Less schooling is associated with increased biological risks for chronic disease, but whether increasing years of schooling through policy interventions reduces these risks remains unclear. We examine the effect of a major education reform introduced in 1959 that raised the minimum school leaving age from 14 to 16 years in France, offering a unique natural experiment. We assess the causal impact of increased schooling duration on 16 biomarkers of…
Physical Health Effects of the Housing Boom: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From the Health and Retirement Study
Objectives. We examined the impact of the dramatic increases in housing prices in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s on physical health outcomes among a representative sample of middle-aged and older Americans. Methods. Using a quasi-experimental design, we exploited geographic and time variation in housing prices using third-party valuation estimates of median single-family detached houses from 1988 to 2007 in each of 2400 zip codes …
Progress Stalled? The Uncertain Future of Mortality in High-Income Countries
Steady and significant improvements in life expectancy have been a bright spot for human progress for the last century or more. Recently, this success has shown signs of faltering in some high-income countries, where mortality improvements have slowed or even reversed since the early 2010s. Combined with the large mortality shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, guaranteed forward progress feels less certain. We review mortality trends in high-income co…
Do biomarkers of stress mediate the relation between socioeconomic status and health
Objectives: To test the relation between socioeconomic status (SES) and biomarkers of chronic stress, including basal cortisol, and to test whether these biomarkers account for the relation between SES and health outcomes. Design: Cross sectional study using data from the 2000 social and environmental biomarkers of aging study (SEBAS). Setting: Taiwan. Participants: Nationally representative sample of 972 men and women aged 54 and older. Main out…
Does the predictive power of self-rated health for subsequent mortality risk vary by socioeconomic status in the US?
BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study is to test whether the predictive power of an individual's self-rated health (SRH) on subsequent mortality risk differs by socioeconomic status (SES) in the United States. METHODS: We use the National Health Interview Survey 1986-94 linked to Multiple Cause of Death Files 1986-97 (NHIS-MCD). Analyses are based on non-Hispanic Black and White adults 25 and older (n = 358,388). Cox proportional hazard models ar…
Early childhood origins of the income/health gradient: The role of maternal health behaviors
Socio-economic status, cortisol and allostatic load: A review of the literature
BACKGROUND: The notion that chronic stress contributes to health inequalities by socio-economic status (SES) through physiological wear and tear has received widespread attention. This article reviews the literature testing associations between SES and cortisol, an important biomarker of stress, as well as the summary index of allostatic load (AL). METHODS: A search of all published literature on the PubMed and ISI Web of Knowledge literature sea…
Early origins of health disparities: Burden of infection, health, and socioeconomic status in U.S. children
Considering the Inclusion of Metabolic and Cardiovascular Markers in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics
The inclusion of biomarkers in social surveys such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has the potential to answer many elusive questions in social science and public health, including the much-studied relationship between socioeconomic status and health. This article reviews the potential inclusion of biomarkers of cardiovascular and metabolic risk in the PSID. We first discuss the considerable analytical benefits of adding these biomar…
Does Self-Rated Health Mean the Same Thing Across Socioeconomic Groups? Evidence From Biomarker Data
Hopelessness, Depression, and Early Markers of Endothelial Dysfunction in U.S. Adults
OBJECTIVE: To examine whether the psychological traits of hopelessness and depressive symptoms are related to endothelial dysfunction. METHODS: Data are derived from a subsample of 434 respondents in the 2001 to 2003 Chicago Community Adult Health Study, a population-based survey designed to study the impact of psychological attributes, neighborhood environment, and socioeconomic circumstances on adults aged ≥18 years. Circulating biomarkers of e…
Reliability of Self-rated Health in US Adults
General self-rated health (SRH) is widely used to study trends and inequalities in population health. Recently, there has been an increased interest in understanding the measurement properties of SRH. This study evaluated for the first time the test-retest reliability of SRH among US adults. Analyses were based on a nationally representative sample of 9,235 adults interviewed in the 2005-2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHAN…
Does Self-reported Health Bias the Measurement of Health Inequalities in U.S. Adults? Evidence Using Anchoring Vignettes From the Health and Retirement Study
These results suggest caution in relying on self-reported health measures to quantify and explain health disparities by socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity/ethnicity in the United States. The findings support expansion of the use of anchoring vignettes to properly account for reporting differences in self-reports of health
Whiners, deniers, and self-rated health: What are the implications for measuring health inequalities? A commentary on Layes, et al
Neighborhood-level stressors, social support, and diurnal patterns of cortisol: The Chicago Community Adult Health Study
Childhood obesity and human capital accumulation
Housing Wealth, Psychological Well-being, and Cognitive Functioning of Older Americans
Housing market volatility may influence the psychological and cognitive health of older adults, highlighting potential health consequences of pro-home ownership policies, which may be especially important in light of recent dramatic housing price declines
Physical Health Effects of the Housing Boom: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From the Health and Retirement Study
Objectives. We examined the impact of the dramatic increases in housing prices in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s on physical health outcomes among a representative sample of middle-aged and older Americans. Methods. Using a quasi-experimental design, we exploited geographic and time variation in housing prices using third-party valuation estimates of median single-family detached houses from 1988 to 2007 in each of 2400 zip codes …
Race/ethnic and socioeconomic differences in stress and immune function in The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health
Stress and immune function may be important mediators of the strong association between social factors and health over the life course, but previous studies have lacked the data to fully explore these links in a population-based sample. This study utilizes data from Waves I-IV of the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to test the associations of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) with levels of perceived…
The Long Arm of Adolescent Health Among Men and Women: Does Attained Status Explain Its Association with Mid-Adulthood Health
Life Expectancy and Education
AffiliationsJennifer Beam Dowd is with Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health and the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research, New York, NY. Amar Hamoudi is with the Sanford School of Public Policy and Duke Population Research Institute, Duke University, Durham. NC
Income and Markers of Immunological Cellular Aging
OBJECTIVE: Socioeconomic disadvantage may contribute to poor health through immune-related biological mechanisms. We examined the associations between socioeconomic status, as measured by annual household income, and T-cell markers of aging, including the ratios of CD4 and CD8 effector cells to naïve cells (E/N ratio) and the CD4/CD8 T-cell ratio. We hypothesized that participants with a lower income would have higher E/N ratios and lower CD4/CD8…
Early life socioeconomic position and immune response to persistent infections among elderly Latinos
Social and population health science approaches to understand the human microbiome
Longer schooling but not better off? A quasi-experimental study of the effect of compulsory schooling on biomarkers in France
Less schooling is associated with increased biological risks for chronic disease, but whether increasing years of schooling through policy interventions reduces these risks remains unclear. We examine the effect of a major education reform introduced in 1959 that raised the minimum school leaving age from 14 to 16 years in France, offering a unique natural experiment. We assess the causal impact of increased schooling duration on 16 biomarkers of…
Demographic science aids in understanding the spread and fatality rates of Covid-19
Governments around the world must rapidly mobilize and make difficult policy decisions to mitigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Because deaths have been concentrated at older ages, we highlight the important role of demography, particularly, how the age structure of a population may help explain differences in fatality rates across countries and how transmission unfolds. We examine the role of age structure in deaths thus far…
Life Course Socioeconomic Disadvantage and the Aging Immune System: Findings From the Health and Retirement Study
CMV IgG levels in older adults are associated with both early-life and adult SES. Life course socioeconomic disadvantage may contribute to disparities in immunological aging
Social network-based distancing strategies to flatten the Covid-19 curve in a post-lockdown world
Social distancing and isolation have been widely introduced to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. Adverse social, psychological and economic consequences of a complete or near-complete lockdown demand the development of more moderate contact-reduction policies. Adopting a social network approach, we evaluate the effectiveness of three distancing strategies designed to keep the curve flat and aid compliance in a post-lockdown world. These are: limitin…
Medicine (30 works) · Population (21 works) · Health disparities and outcomes (20 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Environmental health (17 works) · Demography (16 works) · Gerontology (16 works) · Socioeconomic status (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Economics (10 works)