Elderly people with little or no income tend to require more nursing care than those with higher incomes, according to a recent joint study by Japanese and British researchers.

The study was conducted by Katsunori Kondo, associate professor at Nihon Fukushi University in Aichi Prefecture, and British researchers Iain Carpenter and John Baldock, both at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England.

The three researchers analyzed data on 2,022 British people aged between 60 and 69 based on British government statistics released in 1998 and 1999.

They found that 47.4 percent of low-income earners between the ages of 60 and 69 in Britain had serious illnesses or other health problems, while only 19.3 percent of those in the highest income bracket did.

They also found that 37.1 percent of the elderly in Britain without a higher education suffered from a serious illness, while 23.5 percent of those with higher education did.

Kondo separately referred to data from a state-run pilot project conducted in fiscal 1998, which studied about 5,000 people aged 65 or older who live in Japanese cities with 40,000 residents or more. Kondo found that 11.3 percent of those surveyed required nursing care.

Kondo found a strong correlation between income and those in need of help, with 17.2 percent of elderly earning no income needing help, 8.4 percent of those earning less than 1 million yen a year, 5.4 percent of those earning between 1 million yen and 2 million yen a year, and 3.7 percent of those earning more than 2 million yen a year needing care.