Depressive Symptom Trajectories and Hip Fracture Risk in US and UK Aging Cohorts

Eight-year longitudinal trajectories of depressive symptoms for 7,014 participants from the US Health and Retirement Study and UK English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, linked to 10-year hip fracture incidence. The dataset, authored by Hongzhou Zhao and shared under CC-BY-4.0, was last updated in May 2026. It contains hazard ratios for fracture risk associated with different symptom trajectory groups.

Use Cases

• Modeling hip fracture risk based on longitudinal depressive symptom trajectories.
• Comparing the effects of cognitive-affective versus somatic depressive symptom subtypes on physical health outcomes.
• Analyzing the association between fluctuating versus consistently high symptom patterns and subsequent health events.

Strengths

• Data from two established, large-scale longitudinal aging studies (HRS and ELSA).
• Analysis includes 7,014 participants with 382 incident hip fractures over follow-up.
• Trajectories are based on biennial CES-D assessments over eight consecutive years.

Limitations

• Row count and column-level documentation are unknown, requiring manual inspection after download.
• Data is contained in a 410.6 KB DOCX file, suggesting a limited, likely summary-level dataset rather than raw records.
• The dataset may reflect the geographic and demographic biases inherent to the HRS and ELSA cohorts.

Provenance

Source

Health and Retirement Study (HRS, USA) and English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA, UK).

Collection Method

Biennial assessments using the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D); hip fracture incidence via self-reported physician diagnosis.

Time Range

Depressive symptoms tracked over eight consecutive years, with hip fracture follow-up for ten subsequent years.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-26 05:26:16; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United States and United Kingdom.