Education and health behaviours

A priori it seems reasonable that one of the benefits of more education is better health. For a start there is a positive socioeconomic gradient: more educated people have better health on average. That does not imply one causes the other: both are forms of human capital so it could be some common factor like discount rates that drives the association. But one might think more educated people make better health investment decisions if they are more aware of health risks and there may also be direct cash effects. This paper however finds no evidence of effects.

The causal relationship between education, health and health related behaviour: Evidence from a natural experiment in England
Nils Braakmann (Newcastle University Business School)
I exploit exogenous variation in the likelihood to obtain any sort of academic degree between January- and February-born individuals for 13 academic cohorts in England. For these cohorts compulsory schooling laws interacted with the timing of the CGE and O-level exams to change the probability of obtaining an academic degree by around 2 to 3 percentage points. I then use data on individuals born in these two months from the British Labour Force Survey and the Health Survey for England to investigate the effects of education on health using being February-born as an instrument for education. The results indicate neither an effect of education on various health related measures nor an effect on health related behaviour, e.g., smoking, drinking or eating various types of food.

Do good colleges lead to good health?

Quality and Young Adult Health Behaviors
Jason Fletcher, David Frisvold

Large literatures have shown important links between the quantity of completed education and health outcomes on one hand and the quality of schooling on a host of adult outcomes, such as wages, on the other hand. However, little research has been targeted to producing evidence of the link between school quality and health. The paper presents the first evidence in the literature on the potential short and intermediate term effects of attending a selective college on health behaviors during and following college attendance. Using a variety of empirical methods, this paper shows strong evidence that college quality reduces tobacco and marijuana use but has small and possibly positive effects on binge drinking. The effects on weight behaviors are suggestive of reduced weight, potentially through diet but not exercise change.

Sweating your way through college...

An interesting article reported in the nytimes today shows college students who take regular and vigorous physical exercise score higher grades. A GPA difference of 0.4 (~10%) was estimated after controlling for gender, race, major, study time, and college sports in 266 surveyed college students.

What exercise variables do we have in our college data? be interesting to estimate the effect in Ireland with this larger sample.

Public Dental Services

The Dental Treatment Services Scheme has shown substantial growth in 2009. A staggering 399,262 (34%) more treatments were provided year to date in 2009 than was targeted. At the end of December 2009, the cumulative number of treatments 'above the line' (i.e., routine services, extractions, fillings) was 1.4 million (35% growth) and the number 'below the line' (i.e., specialties like root and gum treatments) was 144,000 (26% growth).

Amazing how resilient dentistry seems to be to the recession.

Of course one must consider that since the beginning of 2009 a lot more people were granted medical cards, due to the dire economic circumstances of the country. This is what the HSE suggested. But the actual increase in the number of people with medical cards over the year was 55,000; which was 4% above target. So by safely assuming these projections are meaningful and represent normal levels of demand in the system, the increase in supply should be attributed to the demand from new card holders; this is the HSE suggestion.

My rough calculations of this appealing hypothesis suggests some bizarre results: every new medical card recipient got about 8 fillings or extractions AND about 3 root canal treatments! Crazy right, but there's more to consider.. these new recipients were mostly the newly unemployed so as PSRI payers they previously had a very generous dental package (now cut) which included two free check-ups and cleanings per year and sizable reductions for most treatments.

To me, unless i'm missing something, the increase is now down to two possibilities: either the quality of existing medical card holders' teeth declined significantly or dentists started to be more sensitive to the dental "needs" of their medical card-holding clients. The former doesn't seem plausible (a 30% decline in dental health in one year!?) yet there is considerable reason to suspect the latter, given the possible fall-off in dentist services from purely private patients (note: general domestic demand for goods and services in Ireland contracted by about 10% in 2009) .

The phenomenon of 'supplier induced demand' (SID) has been empirically validated in many instances and across health professions; it is well documented in the health economics literature. It can also be controlled and managed and, at times like this, it's probably worth considering.

The raw figures are available from the most recent 2009 HSE Healthstats Report.

Clear Relation Between News Stories on Swine Flu and Swine Flu Related Searches

The six one news special on swine flu may have prompted a huge upsurge in searches for swine flue in the country on Monday. It will be interesting to follow how the trend develops:link. Thanks again to google for providing a simple way to evaluate the impact of mass media heath risk communication! Separating the relationships between swine flu related news stories and associated searches and the general mass of swine flu searches could potentially provide a good estimate of the number of new cases.

Electronic Health Library

The All Ireland Electronic Health Library looks like a useful resource:
http://www.aiehl.org/

Doctoral Research Training in Health Behaviour

The website of the American Academy of Health Behaviour is worth looking at:

http://www.aahb.org/

They have an interesting white paper with recommendations for doctoral research training in health behaviour.

This should be interesting to researchers at the centre working in both the higher education and health behaviour streams.