The Relationships between Migration Status and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors in China

Peifeng Hu, University of California, Los Angeles
William M. Mason, University of California, Los Angeles

This paper will use data from a just completed national probability sample survey of 3,000 respondents in China, with oversampling for migrants, to study the relationship between migration status and the risk factors for cardiovascular disease. We will use multiple regression analyses to compare migration categories (e.g. rural-to-urban migrants, urban nonmigrants, and rural nonmigrants) with respect to the distributions of important risk factors, including smoking, physical activity, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, and glycosylated hemoglobin level. We will further explore how these relationships are influenced by life stress, socioeconomic status, social support, and access to health care. When the funding for dried blood spot (DBS)-based bioassays becomes available, we intend to measure C-reactive protein (a marker of inflammation and progression of atherosclerosis), and total and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterols on the stored DBS specimens and examine the relationship between migration status and these DBS-based biomarkers.