TY - JOUR T1 - Military service, combat exposure, and health in the later lives of US men JF - Longitudinal and Life Course Studies Y1 - 2017 A1 - MacLean, Alair A1 - Ryan D. Edwards KW - Depressive symptoms KW - PTSD KW - Veterans AB - Researchers have produced mixed findings regarding the relationship between military service, war-zone deployment, combat exposure, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and physical health at older ages. This article uses data drawn from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to estimate growth curve models that predict how self-rated health and life-threatening illness vary across groups of men defined as combat and non-combat veterans, compared to non-veterans. According to the findings, combat veterans have worse health than men who did not experience combat during the draft era decades after their service, while non-combat veterans have health that is similar to if not better than non-veterans. Combat veterans were less healthy than these other men based both on a subjective measure of self-rated health and on an objective count of life-threatening illnesses several decades after service. Studies that simply compare veterans to non-veterans may thus continue to produce mixed findings, because particular types of veterans serve in ways that relate differently to health. VL - 8 UR - http://www.llcsjournal.org/index.php/llcs/article/view/427 IS - 2 ER - TY - RPRT T1 - Military Service, Combat Exposure, and Health in Retirement Y1 - 2010 A1 - Ryan D. Edwards A1 - MacLean, Alair KW - Demographics KW - Risk Taking AB - Military service has traditionally been the domain of healthy, robust males, but service can also reflect risk preference and socioeconomic status. Service also raises the probability of exposure to violence through combat, a significant stressor, and it may represent other types of treatments as well, both positive and negative. We might expect to find an ambiguous relationship between military service and later-life health, and several recent studies support this. In this paper, we explore the relationship between combat exposure and health past age 50 in the Health and Retirement Study, a rich longitudinal panel including many male veterans that now asks about combat exposure in its core survey. Using regression analysis and an instrumental variables approach, we show that combat exposure harms mental health and emotional well-being and raises a biomarker of stress at older ages, but it appears often to have negligible effects on a wide array of physical health metrics. UR - http://www.groupwise.niu.edu/econ/graduate/Papers/edwards-maclean-combathealth-103010.pdf U4 - military service/risk preference/Socioeconomic Status/combat exposure ER -