Cross-National Associations Between Stressful Life Events and Incident Heart Disease

Harmonized analysis of three nationally representative aging cohorts from China (CHARLS), the United States (HRS), and the United Kingdom (ELSA). The study includes 27,729 participants and documents 4,876 incident heart disease events over a combined 206.2 thousand person-years. The dataset was authored by Panpan Mi and last updated on 2026-04-23.

Use Cases

• Modeling the dose-response relationship between stressful life event count and heart disease risk based on the described categories (0, 1, 2, ≥3 events).
• Conducting cross-national comparative analysis of health outcomes using the harmonized CHARLS, HRS, and ELSA cohort data.
• Performing sensitivity analyses on associations using alternative exposure definitions and competing-risk models as described in the methods.
• Investigating potential effect modification by sex or pre-existing conditions like hypertension or diabetes.

Strengths

• Includes harmonized data from three large, nationally representative cohorts totaling 27,729 participants.
• Documents 4,876 incident heart disease events over 206.2 thousand person-years of follow-up.
• Provides adjusted hazard ratios with confidence intervals for associations across cohorts.
• Licensed under CC-BY-4.0 for open reuse.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The primary file format is DOCX (48.4 KB), which suggests the data may be embedded in a document rather than a structured data file.

Provenance

Source

Harmonized data from the CHARLS (China), HRS (United States), and ELSA (United Kingdom) aging cohorts.

Collection Method

Cox models using attained age as the time scale, with sensitivity analyses including multiple imputation and Fine–Gray competing-risk models.

Time Range

Follow-up periods include 84.2, 95.3, and 26.7 thousand person-years for the respective cohorts.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-23 04:15:36; freshness should be verified.

Geography

China, United States, United Kingdom