Environmental pollution is currently a serious issue in China and has been for the past 10 to 15 years. It is well known that pollution from industry, automobiles and power plants that burn coal exerts cumulative and long-term effects on human health. Most of the older people (85+) included in this analysis lived most of their lives in rural areas prior to the current pollution problems. It is also problematic to associate sources of pollution with older people at the geographic scale used in this analysis. For these reasons, no pollution variables are included in the analysis.