Trajectories of Aging Among U.S. Older Adults: Mixed Evidence for a Hispanic Paradox

A well-documented paradox is that Hispanics tend to live longer than non-Hispanic Whites (NHW), despite structural disadvantages. We evaluate whether the "Hispanic paradox" extends to more comprehensive longitudinal aging classifications and examine how lifecourse factors relate to these groupings.

We used biennial data (1998-2014) on adults aged 65 years and older at baseline from the Health and Retirement Study. We use joint latent class discrete time and growth curve modeling to identify trajectories of aging, and multinomial logit models to determine whether U.S.-born (USB-H) and Foreign-born (FB-H) Hispanics experience healthier styles of aging than non-Hispanic Whites (NHW), and test how lifecycle factors influence this relationship.

We identify four trajectory classes including, "cognitive unhealthy," "high morbidity," "nonaccelerated", and "healthy." Compared to NHWs, both USB-H and FB-H have higher relative risk ratios (RRR) of "cognitive unhealthy" and "high morbidity" classifications, relative to "nonaccelerated." These patterns persist upon controlling for lifecourse factors. Both Hispanic groups, however, also have higher RRRs for "healthy" classification (vs "nonaccelerated") upon adjusting for adult achievements and health behaviors.

Controlling for lifefcourse factors USB-H and FB-H have equal or higher likelihood for "high morbidity" and "cognitive unhealthy" classifications, respectively, relative to NHWs. Yet, both groups are equally likely of being in the "healthy" group compared to NHWs. These segregations into healthy and unhealthy groups require more research and could contribute to explaining the paradoxical patterns produced when population heterogeneity is not taken into account.