The differences between East and West are quarter of year Reunification is still big - also when it comes to health behavior. That was the conclusion of study by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development.
Even 25 years after the fall of the Wall, people in East Germany and West Germany still mostly live in separate worlds. In the east, for example, more people are unemployed, the population is shrinking, with the exception of Berlin and Brandenburg, there are fewer people with migration background, there is less voluntary civic engagement, significantly more people vote The Left and no East German football club play in the First Bundesliga. These are the findings of the study “This is how unity works”, which the Berlin Institute for Population and Development presented on July 22nd. "We were amazed by the results," said Reiner Klingholz, Head of the Berlin Institute.
More alcohol and more tobacco
The health of East Germans has improved significantly since the fall of the Wall. Newborns in the East can now expect around six more years of life than those born shortly before 1989. Especially in the 1970s, people in the GDR lived in much more unhealthy way: They drank more alcohol than West Germans and the men smoked more. High blood pressure and obesity were much more widespread than in the West.
"This also has to do with the different health systems: the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, from which mainly the elderly benefit, was of secondary importance in the GDR." , explained Klingholz. The focus was on maintaining the labor force of the working population. According to the study, mortality from cardiovascular disease for both sexes was one and half times higher in the early 1990s than in the West, where modern medicine contributed significantly to lowering it.
Today occurs Obesity, which is one of the risk factors for cardiovascular diseases, is still more common in the east than in the west. The values are converging, however, because the proportion of sick people in the West has increased more sharply since the fall of the Wall. Although life expectancy has largely adjusted, the five eastern German states had the highest heart attack mortality in 2012, led by Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt. Socio-economic factors such as unemployment and lower education are partly responsible for heart disease. Both risk factors are more pronounced in the East - the latter mainly because of the migration of educated young people to the West, which has more jobs.
The differences between East and West are quarter of year Reunification is still big - also when it comes to health behavior. That was the conclusion of study by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development.
Even 25 years after the fall of the Wall, people in East Germany and West Germany still mostly live in separate worlds. In the east, for example, more people are unemployed, the population is shrinking, with the exception of Berlin and Brandenburg, there are fewer people with migration background, there is less voluntary civic engagement, significantly more people vote The Left and no East German football club play in the First Bundesliga. These are the findings of the study “This is how unity works”, which the Berlin Institute for Population and Development presented on July 22nd. "We were amazed by the results," said Reiner Klingholz, Head of the Berlin Institute.
More alcohol and more tobacco
The health of East Germans has improved significantly since the fall of the Wall. Newborns in the East can now expect around six more years of life than those born shortly before 1989. Especially in the 1970s, people in the GDR lived in much more unhealthy way: They drank more alcohol than West Germans and the men smoked more. High blood pressure and obesity were much more widespread than in the West.
"This also has to do with the different health systems: the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, from which mainly the elderly benefit, was of secondary importance in the GDR." , explained Klingholz. The focus was on maintaining the labor force of the working population. According to the study, mortality from cardiovascular disease for both sexes was one and half times higher in the early 1990s than in the West, where modern medicine contributed significantly to lowering it.
Today occurs Obesity, which is one of the risk factors for cardiovascular diseases, is still more common in the east than in the west. The values are converging, however, because the proportion of sick people in the West has increased more sharply since the fall of the Wall. Although life expectancy has largely adjusted, the five eastern German states had the highest heart attack mortality in 2012, led by Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt. Socio-economic factors such as unemployment and lower education are partly responsible for heart disease. Both risk factors are more pronounced in the East - the latter mainly because of the migration of educated young people to the West, which has more jobs.
In the year of reunification, there were significantly more alcohol-related deaths in the former GDR than in West Germany. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, for example, three times as many people died as result of alcohol abuse in 1990 than the national average. This was mainly because schnapps was the second most popular intoxicant in the GDR after beer. From 1950 to 1989 the consumption of high-proof spirits rose from 1.3 liters per inhabitant to over 15 liters. “In contrast to everything else, there was large selection of schnapps on the shelves and many of them brewed it themselves,” reported Klingholz. In the West, on the other hand, wine was much more popular than hard liquor.
As before, significantly more people in the eastern German federal states die from the consequences of current alcohol consumption, but the elderly also from the consequences of earlier drinking. In addition, the number of alcohol-related traffic accidents is higher in the east. "East Germans are more likely to get behind the wheel after being drunk," said the head of the Berlin Institute.
In contrast, there were and are significantly more deaths from illegal drugs in West Germany and especially in the two largest city-states. In Berlin and Hamburg three times as many people die from the effects of hard drugs as the national average. In the GDR, illegal drugs played no role due to the stricter border controls. Today, synthetically produced drugs such as crystal meth from the Czech Republic are increasingly reaching Saxony, Thuringia and Bavaria.
Less breast cancer in the East
With regard to general cancer mortality, there were differences between East and West at the time of the fall little. However, there are differences with individual types of cancer: women in the east have significantly lower death and new disease rates from breast cancer to this day. The authors of the study attribute this to the younger age at the birth of the first child, which in the east was and is an average of 22 years. Early and multiple births reduce the risk of breast cancer. Eastern women are also less likely to develop lung cancer. The gap even widened from 1990 to 2012 compared to the west. The reason is believed to be that western women started smoking earlier.
Petra Bühring
@ www.berlin-institut.org / publications / studies / so-geht-Einheit.html
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