Revisiting Compression of Morbidity and Health Disparities in the 21st Century

“Compression of morbidity,” a notion introduced by physician James Fries in 1980, remains an important construct in aging and population health research.[1] Also referred to as the “rectangularization” of morbidity and mortality curves, compression of morbidity denotes an ideal population health dynamic in which people live long, healthy lives with declines in physical and cognitive health associated with senescence “compressed” into a short time period at the end of life. Fries posited that postponing health declines until just before death would have “profound” positive social consequences and should be the priority of health policy. In 1990, sociologists James House, Ronald Kessler, and Regula Herzog published an article titled “Age, Socioeconomic Status, and Health” in The Milbank Quarterly.[2] This well‐cited article is an important contribution in the history of population health research for two key reasons. First, it presents one of the first empirical tests of the construct of compression of morbidity in the United States, using cross‐sectional data from two nationally representative population‐based surveys: the 1984 National Health Interview Survey and the 1986 Americans’ Changing Lives (ACL) survey, which the authors had co‐designed.