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What Am I Reading? Studying Environmental Hazards and Health in Older Adults: Use of the Health and Retirement Study

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Written by Jenna Tipaldo, CUNY School of Public Health and CUNY Institute for Demographic Research, jenna.tipaldo09@sphmail.cuny.edu

November 2025

The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is an ongoing longitudinal study of middle-aged and older adults. It is designed to be nationally-representative of the U.S. population over age 50 and it adds a new cohort every six years. The HRS presents an excellent opportunity to study life course exposures and health outcomes in older adults. Many researchers have used the HRS to investigate the impacts of environmental exposures, including disasters (Bell et al., 2019; Brilleman et al., 2017), heat (Choi et al., 2023; Choi & Ailshire, 2025), air pollution (Van Dang et al., 2025; Zhang et al., 2023), and greenspace (Fossa et al., 2024).  

Several features of the HRS study design make it well suited for studies of environmental exposures and health outcomes. As a study that follows participants (and their spouses) until death, the HRS has detailed longitudinal information about participants. The study has high response panel rates, consistently over 85% until 2016 (HRS Staff, 2025). When participants do not response, the HRS staff make an effort to determine whether a participant is still living or has died. Among participants who have died, there is an attempt to conduct an exit interview with someone close to the participant such as a spouse or child. The HRS fields a core survey every two years, which includes questions regarding health and demographic variables. In off-years, additional surveys are fielded, including the Life History questionnaire that covers a respondent’s history before age 50. There are many cross-wave and longitudinal files, including the RAND Longitudinal file, that combine the many waves of surveys that lower barriers for longitudinal analyses. It is also notable that there are many “sister studies” to the U.S. HRS, which are catalogued in the “Gateway to Global Aging Data repository” </from many countries around the world.</

The HRS can be linked with data that can help determine exposure to environmental hazards. Using geographic detail that is accessible via a restricted data enclave, researchers can link external datasets with HRS survey responses to assess environmental exposures and associated outcomes. Via the Geographic Linkages Repository and HRS Contextual Data Resource Series, the HRS team even makes available linkages with several datasets created by various research teams including the many resources in the National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA).  </

In addition to weather data from weather stations and PRISM (Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model), this resource can also provide the context about a respondent’s Census tract, for example, such as land use, polluting sites, urbanicity, as well as socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Dick (2022) provides a review of the HRS Contextual data resources.  

A great resource for researchers new to the Health and Retirement Study is Amanda Sonnega’s guide, “Using HRS Data: A Guide for New Users.” </

The materials include a document with an overview of the study design, survey content, available data products, how to access data, and guidance for data analysis. In addition, the guide points to code examples, which are available in four programming languages (R, SAS, STATA, and SPSS) and provide sample code for common steps in analysis of HRS data such as merging files, transforming data between wide and long formats, and using survey weights. The Gateway to Global Aging Data repository also has guides for researchers interested in conducting cross-country studies.  

Looking for CACHE’s description of the coding guide? Find it here. 

References 

  • Bell, S. A., Choi, H., Langa, K. M., & Iwashyna, T. J. (2019). Health Risk Behaviors after Disaster Exposure Among Older Adults. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, 34(1), 95–97. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049023X18001231 
  • Brilleman, S. L., Wolfe, R., Moreno-Betancur, M., Sales, A. E., Langa, K. M., Li, Y., Daugherty Biddison, E. L., Rubinson, L., & Iwashyna, T. J. (2017). Associations between community-level disaster exposure and individual-level changes in disability and risk of death for older Americans. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 173, 118–125. J Glob Health. 2024;14:04101. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.12.007 
  • Choi, E. Y., & Ailshire, J. A. (2025). Ambient outdoor heat and accelerated epigenetic aging among older adults in the US. Science Advances, 11(9), eadr0616. doi:10.1126/sciadv.adr0616 
  • Choi, E. Y., Lee, H., & Chang, V. W. (2023). Cumulative exposure to extreme heat and trajectories of cognitive decline among older adults in the USA. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 77(11), 728–735. doi:10.1136/jech-2023-220675 
  • Dick, C. (2022). The Health and Retirement Study: Contextual Data Augmentation. Forum for Health Economics and Policy, 25(1-2), 29-40. doi:10.1515/fhep-2021-0068 
  • Fossa, A. J., D’Souza, J., Bergmans, R. S., Zivin, K., & Adar, S. D. (2024). Different types of greenspace within urban parks and depressive symptoms among older U.S. adults living in urban areas. Environment International, 192, 109016. doi:10.1016/j.envint.2024.109016 
  • Van Dang, K., Choi, E. Y., Crimmins, E., Finch, C., & Ailshire, J. (2025). The Joint Effects of Exposure to Ambient Long-term Air Pollution and Short-term Heat on Epigenetic Aging in the Health and Retirement Study. The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, 80(7), glaf092. doi:10.1093/gerona/glaf092 
  • Zhang, B., Langa, K. M., Weuve, J., D’Souza, J., Szpiro, A., Faul, J., Mendes De Leon, C., Kaufman, J. D., Lisabeth, L., Hirth, R. A., & Adar, S. D. (2023). Hypertension and Stroke as Mediators of Air Pollution Exposure and Incident Dementia. JAMA Network Open, 6(9), e2333470. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.33470