This project will explore the degree to which people in the same family share similarities in health experience in adulthood, compared to unrelated people from the same locales and belonging to the same cohorts. The study population will consist of the parents and children and siblings among 1,265 adults belonging to insurance organizations that paid benefits for work loss because of sickness and death, and for those reasons kept their members' health under continuous surveillance. These records, which extend across two to four generations, will also make it possible to investigate whether family factors assume greater weight over time as chronic and degenerative diseases became relatively more important as causes of sickness and death.
