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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Did they control for economic class? If all the smarter people are richer, it would follow that they lived healthier lives with better access to medical care.

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Yes. From the linked page:

> Sensitivity analyses on a representative subsample of the cohort observed only small attenuation of the estimated effect of intelligence (by 10-26%) after adjustment for potential confounders, including three indicators of childhood socioeconomic status. In a replication sample from Scotland, in a similar birth year cohort and follow-up period, smoking and adult socioeconomic status partially attenuated (by 16-58%) the association of intelligence with outcome rates.

If you control for positively correlated variables, the results are more dramatic right? Higher intelligence leads to lower death And higher intelligence to higher income then lower death. So actuarial effects multiply.

All participants lived in a society with socialized healthcare built around a “free at the point of service” model. That’s not to say that socioeconomic status doesn’t play a part (as other commenters have noted) but the difference in access to healthcare due to wealth is relatively small in the UK in general

There are still wide health inequalities in the UK.

Poor people eat worse food; don't get as much exercise; and smoke more.

You can predict average life expectancy by post-code, and that's based on socio-economic factors.

> Poor people eat worse food; don't get as much exercise; and smoke more

How is choosing to smoke more an inequality?

I suspect because if your peer group smoke it is much more difficult to choose to not to smoke?

That’s the kind of thing that population health researchers study.

Answers include availability, lack of availability of healthier alternatives, targeted marketing, being missed by anti-smoking campaigns, and peer group influences.

While smoking may be a personal choice, it is not made in a vacuum.

Smoking is “reward now, pay later”

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

There are pretty big differences in life expectancy here in Scotland - which given that it is heavily location based suggests that "socioeconomic status" plays a huge role.

"Men in the least deprived areas of Scotland may live 12.5 years longer than those in the most deprived areas while women in the least deprived areas could expect to live 8.5 years longer than those in the most deprived."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-2964...

Edit: Interactive visualization of deprivation in Scotland: http://simd.scot/

False. All participants were born and took their IQ tests a year before the very first elements of the NHS came into existence.

And health (and all other) outcomes are strongly affected in the UK by geography. On average you'll live in Sussex nearly a decade longer than in Cowdenbeath. In Glasgow as late as the mid-1980s the average male life expectancy was 58 years, and then Scotland had the shit kicked out of it, on purpose, for twelve years, by the 1979 Thatcher government. Cuts in healthcare were inflicted disproportionately-severely on places which did not vote for the Conservatives, and nowhere were they more severe than central Scotland and south Wales.

False? The subjects have lived >75% of their lives with national health. And the older you are the more you use health services. While it may be the least good in Scotland, it’s enormously better than being uninsured in the US where people are understandably reluctant to visit the doctor’s office at all.

Nothing you say contradicts the parent’s post. So ‘false’ is incorrect as well as obnoxious.

My first question too:

> In the absence of individual level data on socioeconomic status in the full SMS1947, we used school attended as a proxy measure to adjust for potential confounding by background socioeconomic status. A Scottish cohort study has shown that primary school has moderate correlation with paternal social class.

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