Long-Term Associations between Disaster-Related Home Loss and Health and Well-Being of Older Survivors: Nine Years after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

• Koichiro Shiba ^[5] ; Hiroyuki Hikichi ^[1] ; Sakurako S. Okuzono ^[6] ; Tyler J. VanderWeele ^[7] ; Mariana Arcaya ^[2] ; Adel Daoud ^[8] ; Richard G. Cowden ^[3] ; Aki Yazawa ^[9] ; David T. Zhu ^[10] ; Jun Aida ^[4] ; Katsunori Kondo ^[11] ; Ichiro Kawachi ^[6]
  1. [1] Kitasato University

     Kitasato University

     Japón

     
  2. [2] Massachusetts Institute of Technology

     Massachusetts Institute of Technology

     City of Cambridge, Estados Unidos

     
  3. [3] Harvard University

     Harvard University

     City of Cambridge, Estados Unidos

     
  4. [4] Tokyo Medical and Dental University

     Tokyo Medical and Dental University

     Japón

     
  5. [5] Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Human Flourishing Program, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
  6. [6] Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
  7. [7] Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Human Flourishing Program, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
  8. [8] Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden; Division of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden
  9. [9] Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Department of Epidemiology and Prevention, Center for Clinical Sciences, National Center for Global Health and Medicine, Tokyo, Japan
  10. [10] 0Faculty of Science, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada
  11. [11] 2Department of Gerontological Evaluation, National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology, Aichi, Japan; 3Department of Social Preventive Medical Sciences, Center for Preventive Medical Sciences, Chiba University, Chiba, Japan

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• Localización: Environmental health perspectives, ISSN 0091-6765, Vol. 130, Nº. 7, 2022
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.1289/EHP10903
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• Resumen

  • Little research has examined associations between disaster-related home loss and multiple domains of health and well-being, with extended long-term follow-up and comprehensive adjustment for pre-disaster characteristics of survivors.

    We examined the longitudinal associations between disaster-induced home loss and 34 indicators of health and well-being, assessed ∼9y post-disaster.

    We used data from a preexisting cohort study of Japanese older adults in an area directly impacted by the 2011 Japan Earthquake (n=3,350 and n=2,028, depending on the outcomes). The study was initiated in 2010, and disaster-related home loss status was measured in 2013 retrospectively. The 34 outcomes were assessed in 2020 and covered dimensions of physical health, mental health, health behaviors/sleep, social well-being, cognitive social capital, subjective well-being, and prosocial/altruistic behaviors. We estimated the associations between disaster-related home loss and the outcomes, using targeted maximum likelihood estimation and SuperLearner. We adjusted for pre-disaster characteristics from the wave conducted 7 months before the disaster (i.e., 2010), including prior outcome values that were available.

    After Bonferroni correction for multiple testing, we found that home loss (vs. no home loss) was associated with increased posttraumatic stress symptoms (standardized difference=0.50; 95% CI: 0.35, 0.65), increased daily sleepiness (0.38; 95% CI: 0.21, 0.54), lower trust in the community (−0.36; 95% CI: −0.53, −0.18), lower community attachment (−0.60; 95% CI: −0.75, −0.45), and lower prosociality (−0.39; 95% CI: −0.55, −0.24). We found modest evidence for the associations with increased depressive symptoms, increased hopelessness, more chronic conditions, higher body mass index, lower perceived mutual help in the community, and decreased happiness. There was little evidence for associations with the remaining 23 outcomes.

    Home loss due to a disaster may have long-lasting adverse impacts on the cognitive social capital, mental health, and prosociality of older adult survivors. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP10903