How renting could affect your health - and not for the better

Our homes play a number of vital roles in our lives. They are where we rest, spend time with friends and family, and can be most ourselves. Given this central role it is not surprising that researchers have found a number of important relationships between the homes we live in and our health.

A lot of this evidence uses subjective measures, where people are asked in surveys to rate their health, usually on a scale from poor to excellent. Our recent paper added to this evidence by exploring the association between housing and health using an objective indicator: C-reactive protein (CRP) level. CRP is a marker found in the blood that is associated with infection and stress, and at high levels with increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

We found that private renters have higher levels of CRP, indicating worse health, than owner occupiers. People who lived in detached houses had lower CRP compared to people living in other types of housing, such as flats or semi-detached homes. Surprisingly, we found that people paying high proportions of their income on housing costs had lower CRP levels, although only if they were renting. These findings have important implications for current...