Rural-urban health disparities among older adults in South Africa

• Main Authors: Karl Peltzer (Author), Nancy Phaswana-Mafuya (Author), Supa Pengpid (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: AOSIS, 2019-06-01T00:00:00Z.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.

Summary

Background: There are limited studies assessing rural-urban disparities among older adults in Africa including South Africa. Aim: This study explores rural-urban health disparities among older adults in a population-based survey in South Africa. Setting: Data for this study emanated from the 2008 study on 'Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE) wave 1' (N = 3280) aged 50 years or older in South Africa. Methods: Associations between exposure variables and outcome variables (health status variables and chronic conditions) were examined through bivariate analyses and multivariable logistic regression. Results: Rural dwellers were more likely to be older, black African and had lower education and wealth than urban dwellers. Rural and urban dwellers reported a similar prevalence of self-rated health status, quality of life, severe functional disability, arthritis, asthma, lung disease, hypertension, obesity, underweight, stroke and/or angina, low vision, depression, anxiety and nocturnal sleep problems. Adjusting for socio-demographic and health risk behaviour variables, urban dwellers had a higher prevalence of diabetes (OR: 2.36, 95% CI: 1.37, 4.04), edentulism (OR: 2.79, 95% CI: 1.27, 6.09) and cognitive functioning (OR: 1.91, 95% CI: 1.27, 2.85) than rural dwellers. Conclusion: There are some rural-urban health disparities in South Africa, that is, urban dwellers had a higher prevalence of diabetes, edentulism and cognitive functioning than rural ones. Understanding these rural-urban health variations may help in developing better strategies to improve health across geolocality in South Africa.

Item Description

2071-2928
2071-2936
10.4102/phcfm.v11i1.1890