ABSTRACT
The health of men who are more than 55 years old is shaped by a host of social and contextual factors that vary widely depending on men’s earlier life-course experiences, access to health-promoting resources and capabilities, utilization of timely healthcare services, high-risk behaviors, and support from both social networks and the healthcare system. Overall, men’s shorter life expectancy, when compared to that of women, can be attributed, at least in part, to lower utilization of all forms of preventive health services and higher rates of alcohol consumption, illicit drug use, and smoking, in addition to rising obesity rates (Pinkhasov et al., 2010). Although White men have recently had a concerning increase in midlife all-cause mortality (Case & Deaton, 2015), studies confirm that African American and Hispanic men, along with socioeconomically marginalized men, continue to be medically underserved and experience marked health disparities in later life (Brown, Hargrove, & Griffith, 2015). For instance, previous research has documented that the cancer mortality rate from all forms of the disease is 24% higher in African American men than in their White counterparts, and much of that disparity persists even when accounting for socioeconomic status and access to healthcare (DeSantis et al., 2016).
