Aging demographic profile in municipalities in the state of Pará, Brazil

ABSTRACT Objective: To investigate socioeconomic and demographic differences regarding population aging in municipalities of the state of Pará, Brazil. Method: Ecological study with secondary demographic, socioeconomic and health data from the 144 municipalities of the state of Pará, Brazil. Data were treated with segmentation analysis, the Mann-Whitney U test and logistic regression models, with a significance level of p ≤ 0.05. Results: Segmentation analysis provided a single variable to describe aging in the municipalities of Pará and originated two clusters, the high and low aging rate ones, with 104 (72.22%) and 40 (27.78%) municipalities in each, respectively. The fitted model revealed an association between aging and per capita income (p = 0.021), vulnerability to poverty (p = 0.003), rich to poor ratio (p = 0.012) and density of people (p = 0.019). Conclusion: There is heterogeneity in the population aging among the municipalities of Pará, mainly regarding socioeconomic conditions and number of people living in the municipalities.