How does someone’s work history—specifically, the physical demands of that work over the life course—affect their health as they age? What is the correlation between race/ethnicity and work conditions, and how may that contribute to health disparities in older adults?

These questions compelled Sung Park, PhD, assistant professor of gerontology at University of Massachusetts Boston, to begin her study, Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Functional Limitations Among U.S.-born Older Adults: Examining the Role of Physically Demanding Work.

head shot of Sung Park
Sung S. Park, PhD

“In the United States, we spend a lot of our adult life at work, and yet it’s not clear how that work impacts us beyond money and benefits such as healthcare,” Park says. “This study looks at the physical demands performed by Americans throughout their working lives to understand how physical health in later life is affected by this differential exposure, by race and ethnicity.”

Previous studies have shown that Black and Hispanic workers are more likely to perform more physically demanding work than White workers, but their cumulative exposure was unknown. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, the researchers (Park, Anne R. Pebley, Noreen Goldman, Boriana Pratt, and Mara Getz Sheftel) used retrospective data on people’s work histories of jobs held from young adulthood to middle age to quantify how much of someone’s working life was spent doing high-intensity physical work. They linked this to the number of functional limitations reported in later life. By age 60, stark differences in physical health by race and ethnicity were already evident.

“Given that functional limitations at older ages are associated with accumulated physical wear and tear throughout life, investigating mechanisms that differentially expose Black and Hispanic Americans to more difficult material circumstances over time is an important step toward understanding health disparities,” Park et al. wrote.

Park hopes that the study encourages more people to examine health inequities in later life through a life course approach. Everything that people experience throughout their lives affects how they age.

“Our understanding of how work really impacts us physically, and how it affects our health later on, is still not completely known at a population level. This study is an attempt to think about work more broadly for the older adult population,” Park says. “I hope that people will really think about the multidimensional facets of work, and move beyond a purely economic perspective. What do these jobs require us to do, and what do they expose us to? And is that good or bad?”