The Costs of Coping: Long-Term Mortality Risk in Aging Men

Prospective associations between coping and all-cause mortality risk are understudied, particularly among nonmedical samples. We assessed independent and joint associations of multiple components of the transactional stress and coping model with all-cause mortality in a cohort of community-dwelling men. We were particularly interested in how coping effort related to mortality.

Participants included 743 men from the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study who completed 1+ stress and coping assessment in 1993-2002 (baseline age: M = 68.4, standard deviation [SD] = 7.1) and had mortality follow-up through 2020. The Brief California Coping Inventory assessed coping with a past-month stressor. Cox regression evaluated associations of problem stressfulness, coping strategies, total coping effort, and coping efficiency with all-cause mortality risk.

Over a mean follow-up of 16.7 years (SD = 7.1), 473 (64%) men died. Problem stressfulness was not associated with mortality risk (hazard ratio [HR]: 1.07, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.98-1.17), adjusted for demographics and health conditions. When examining coping via specific strategies, only social coping was associated with higher mortality risk (HR: 1.15, 95% CI: 1.05-1.26) after Bonferroni correction. Total coping effort was associated with 14% greater risk of all-cause mortality (95% CI: 1.04-1.26), independent of problem stressfulness, demographics, and health conditions. Coping efficiency, a benefit-cost ratio of coping efficacy to total coping effort, was not associated with mortality risk in adjusted models.

Total coping effort may be an important indicator for longevity among aging men, above and beyond problem stressfulness and specific coping strategies, which have been the foci in prior research.