Image by Image via Pixabay / Victor Tangermann
They may be injury leaders for countless businesses, but millennials don’t seem to be overheating themselves.
Anyway, that’s according to a team of Ohio State University sociologists who found a worrying trend: X and Y generations – that second group is commonly referred to as millennials – are getting really bad. According to their research, published Thursday in the American Journal of Epidemiology, began a downward shift of psychological, psychological and behavioral health patterns in infant boomers and then continued through gen X and especially millennials.
“The worsening health profiles we found in gen X and gen Y are alarming,” Ohio State chief researcher and professor of sociology Hui Zheng said in a press release.
“If we can’t find a way to slow this trend, we may see an increase in morbidity and mortality rates in the United States as these generations get older,” he said.
In particular, Zheng and graduate student Paola Echave looked over data from two gigantic studies involving nearly 700,000 people conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics to see how human health changed over time and across generations.
Rising obesity is not the only cause of declining health, although the study notes that it appears to contribute to some of the factors used. to ensure overall health. Other factors such as depression, increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and an increase in drug and alcohol use also contributed.
“One chance is that people in the older generations are quitting smoking in larger numbers while the younger generations are more likely to start smoking,” Zheng said in the news. “But we need to do more research to see if that’s right.”
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