Childhood Deprivation and Health Inequality in Later Life Across Divergent Life-Course Contexts: Evidence from Estonia, Latvia, and Israel

TL;DR

This study investigates how childhood socioeconomic deprivation impacts health in later life across Estonia, Latvia, and Israel, revealing persistent health inequalities linked to early-life disadvantages amid systemic societal changes.

Contribution

It provides comparative evidence on the long-term health effects of childhood deprivation across different institutional and migration contexts, highlighting its enduring influence.

Findings

Childhood deprivation is linked to poorer late-life health outcomes.

Higher deprivation correlates with increased odds of multifrailty and chronic diseases.

Health inequalities persist regardless of linguistic or national context.

Abstract

Childhood socioeconomic disadvantage is a well established determinant of health in later life. Less is known about how early-life deprivation unfolds when individuals experience major institutional transformation and migration in adulthood. Cohorts socialized under Soviet institutions provide a useful setting to examine life-course divergence under systemic change. This study uses harmonized data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) on older adults residing in Estonia, Latvia, and Israel to examine the association between retrospectively reported childhood deprivation and multiple health outcomes in later life, including poor self-rated health, chronic disease burden, functional limitation, depression, and a composite multifrailty indicator. Logistic regression models and predicted probabilities assess whether childhood deprivation predicts late-life health across different adult institutional contexts and whether associations vary by linguistic affiliation. Higher levels of childhood deprivation are consistently associated with poorer health outcomes across all three countries. Individuals in the highest deprivation quintile show substantially higher odds of adverse health outcomes, including multifrailty. Stratified analyses for Estonia and Latvia indicate broadly similar deprivation-health gradients among national-language and Russian-speaking populations. These findings highlight the persistence of childhood disadvantage and the importance of early-life conditions in shaping health inequalities in ageing populations exposed to systemic transformation.