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Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 31st July 2017

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Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.

An exploratory study on using principal-component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to identify bolt-on dimensions: the EQ-5D case study. Value in Health Published 14th July 2017

I’m not convinced by the idea of using bolt-on dimensions for multi-attribute utility instruments. A state description with a bolt-on refers to a different evaluative space, and therefore is not comparable with the progenitor, thus undermining its purpose. Maybe this study will persuade me otherwise. The authors analyse data from the Multi Instrument Comparison database, including responses to EQ-5D-5L, SF-6D, HUI3, AQoL 8D and 15D questionnaires, as well as the ICECAP and 3 measures of subjective well-being. Content analysis was used to allocate items from the measures to underlying constructs of health-related quality of life. The sample of 8022 was randomly split, with one half used for principal-component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, and the other used for validation. This approach looks at the underlying constructs associated with health-related quality of life and the extent to which individual items from the questionnaires influence them. Candidate items for bolt-ons are those items from questionnaires other than the EQ-5D that are important and not otherwise captured by the EQ-5D questions. The principal-component analysis supported a 9-component model: physical functioning, psychological symptoms, satisfaction, pain, relationships, speech/cognition, hearing, energy/sleep and vision. The EQ-5D only covered physical functioning, psychological symptoms and pain. Therefore, items from measures that explain the other 6 components represent bolt-on candidates for the EQ-5D. This study succeeds in its aim. It demonstrates what appears to be a meaningful quantitative approach to identifying items not fully captured by the EQ-5D, which might be added as bolt-ons. But it doesn’t answer the question of which (if any) of these bolt-ons ought to be added, or in what circumstances. That would at least require pre-definition of the evaluative space, which might not correspond to the authors’ chosen model of health-related quality of life. If it does, then these findings would be more persuasive as a reason to do away with the EQ-5D altogether.

Endogenous information, adverse selection, and prevention: implications for genetic testing policy. Journal of Health Economics Published 13th July 2017

If you can afford it, there are all sorts of genetic tests available nowadays. Some of them could provide valuable information about the risk of particular health problems in the future. Therefore, they can be used to guide individuals’ decisions about preventive care. But if the individual’s health care is financed through insurance, that same information could prove costly. It could reinforce that classic asymmetry of information and adverse selection problem. So we need policy that deals with this. This study considers the incentives and insurance market outcomes associated with four policy options: i) mandatory disclosure of test results, ii) voluntary disclosure, iii) insurers knowing the test was taken, but not the results and iv) complete ban on the use of test information by insurers. The authors describe a utility model that incorporates the use of prevention technologies, and available insurance contracts, amongst people who are informed or uninformed (according to whether they have taken a test) and high or low risk (according to test results). This is used to estimate the value of taking a genetic test, which differs under the four different policy options. Under voluntary disclosure, the information from a genetic test always has non-negative value to the individual, who can choose to only tell their insurer if it’s favourable. The analysis shows that, in terms of social welfare, mandatory disclosure is expected to be optimal, while an information ban is dominated by all other options. These findings are in line with previous studies, which were less generalisable according to the authors. In the introduction, the authors state that “ethical issues are beyond the scope of this paper”. That’s kind of a problem. I doubt anybody who supports an information ban does so on the basis that they think it will maximise social welfare in the fashion described in this paper. More likely, they’re worried about the inequities in health that mandatory disclosure could reinforce, about which this study tells us nothing. Still, an information ban seems to be a popular policy, and studies like this indicate that such decisions should be reconsidered in light of their expected impact on social welfare.

Returns to scientific publications for pharmaceutical products in the United States. Health Economics [PubMed] Published 10th July 2017

Publication bias is a big problem. Part of the cause is that pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to publish negative findings for their own products. Though positive findings may be valuable in terms of sales. As usual, it isn’t quite that simple when you really think about it. This study looks at the effect of publications on revenue for 20 branded drugs in 3 markets – statins, rheumatoid arthritis and asthma – using an ‘event-study’ approach. The authors analyse a panel of quarterly US sales data from 2003-2013 alongside publications identified through literature searches and several drug- and market-specific covariates. Effects are estimated using first difference and difference in first difference models. The authors hypothesise that publications should have an important impact on sales in markets with high generic competition, and less in those without or with high branded competition. Essentially, this is what they find. For statins and asthma drugs, where there was some competition, clinical studies in high-impact journals increased sales to the tune of $8 million per publication. For statins, volume was not significantly affected, with mediation through price. In rhematoid arthritis, where competition is limited, the effect on sales was mediated by the effect on volume. Studies published in lower impact journals seemed to have a negative influence. Cost-effectiveness studies were only important in the market with high generic competition, increasing statin sales by $2.2 million on average. I’d imagine that these impacts are something with which firms already have a reasonable grasp. But this study provides value to public policy decision makers. It highlights those situations in which we might expect manufacturers to publish evidence and those in which it might be worthwhile increasing public investment to pick up the slack. It could also help identify where publication bias might be a bigger problem due to the incentives faced by pharmaceutical companies.

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Sam Watson’s journal round-up for 24th July 2017

Sam Watson Leave a comment

Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.

Ten years after the financial crisis: the long reach of austerity and its global impacts on health. Social Science & Medicine [PubMed] Published 22nd June 2017

The subject of austerity and its impact on health has generated its own subgenre in the academic literature. We have covered a number of papers on these journal round-ups on this topic, which, given the nature of economic papers, are generally quantitative in nature. However, while quantitative studies are necessary for generation of knowledge of the social world, they are not sufficient. At aggregate levels, quantitative studies may often rely on a black box approach. We may reasonably conclude a policy caused a change in some population-level indicator on the basis of a causal inference type paper, but we often need other types of evidence to answer why or how this occurred. A realist philosophy of social science may see this as a process of triangulation; at the very least it’s a process of abduction to develop theory that best explains what we observe. In clinical research, Bradford-Hill’s famous criteria can be used as a heuristic for causal inference: a cause can be attributed to an effect if it demonstrates a number of criteria including dose-response and reproducibility. For social science, we can conceive of a similar set of criteria. Effects must follow causes, there has to be a plausible mechanism, and so forth. This article in Social Science & Medicine introduces a themed issue on austerity and its effects on health. The issue contains a number of papers examining experiences of people with respect to austerity and how these may translate into changes in health. One example is a study in a Mozambican hospital and how health outcomes change in response to continued restructuring programs due to budget shortfalls. Another study explores the narrative of austerity in Guyana and it has long been sold as necessary for future benefits which never actually materialise. It is not immediately clear how austerity is being defined here, but it is presumably something like ‘a fiscal contraction that causes a significant increase in aggregate unemployment‘. In any case, it makes for interesting reading and complements economics research on the topic. It is a refreshing change from the bizarre ravings we featured a couple of weeks ago!

Home-to-home time — measuring what matters to patients and payers. New England Journal of Medicine [PubMed] Published 6th July 2017

Length of hospital stay is often used as a metric to evaluate hospital performance: for a given severity of illness, a shorter length of hospital stay may suggest higher quality care. However, hospitals can of course game these metrics, and they are further complicated by survival bias. Hospitals are further incentivised to reduce length of stay. For example, the move from per diem reimbursement to per episode had the effect of dramatically reducing length of stay in hospitals. As a patient recovers, they may no longer need hospital based care, the care they require may be adequately provided in other institutional settings. Although, in the UK there has been a significant issue with many patients convalescing in hospital for extended periods as they wait for a place in residential care homes. Thus from the perspective of the whole health system, length of stay in hospital may no longer be the right metric to evaluate performance. This article makes this argument and provides some interesting statistics. For example, between 2004 and 2011 the average length of stay in hospital among Medicare beneficiaries in the US decreased from 6.3 to 5.7 days; post-acute care stays increased from 4.8 to 6.0 days. Thus, the total time in care actually increased from 11.1 to 11.7 days over this period. In the post-acute care setting, Medicare still reimburses providers on a per diem basis, so total payments adjusted for inflation also increased. This article makes the argument that we need to structure incentives and reimbursement schemes across the whole care system if we want to ensure efficiency and equity.

The population health benefits of a healthy lifestyle: life expectancy increased and onset of disability delayed. Health Affairs [PubMed] Published July 2017

Obesity and tobacco smoking increase the risk of ill health and in so doing reduce life expectancy. The same goes for alcohol, although the relationship between alcohol consumption and risk of illness is less well understood. One goal of public health policy is to mitigate these risks. One successful way of communicating the risks of different behaviours is as changes to life expectancy, or conversely ‘effective age‘. From a different perspective, understanding how different risk factors affect life expectancy and disability-free life expectancy is important for cost-benefit analyses of different public health interventions. This study estimates life expectancy and disability-free life expectancy associated with smoking, obesity, and moderate alcohol consumption using the US-based Health and Retirement Study. However, I struggle to see how this study adds much; while it communicates its results well, it is, in essence, a series of univariate comparisons followed by a multivariate comparison. This has been done widely before, such as here and here. Nevertheless, the results reinforce those previous studies. For example, obesity reduced disability-free life expectancy by 3 years for men and 6 years for women.

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Thesis Thursday: Till Seuring

Chris Sampson 1 Comment

On the third Thursday of every month, we speak to a recent graduate about their thesis and their studies. This month’s guest is Dr Till Seuring who graduated with a PhD from the University of East Anglia. If you would like to suggest a candidate for an upcoming Thesis Thursday, get in touch.

Title
The economics of type 2 diabetes in middle-income countries
Supervisors
Marc Suhrcke, Max Bachmann, Pieter Serneels
Repository link
https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/63278/

What made you want to study the economics of diabetes?

I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when I was 18. So while looking for a topic for my master’s thesis in development economics, I was wondering about how big of a problem diabetes – in particular, type 2 diabetes – would be in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), because I had never heard about it during my studies. Looking for data I found some on Mexico, where, as it turned out, diabetes was a huge problem and ended up writing my master’s thesis on the labour market effects of diabetes in Mexico. After that, I worked at the International Diabetes Federation as a health economist in a junior position for about a year and a half and at one of their conferences met Prof Marc Suhrcke, who is doing a lot of global health and non-communicable disease related work. We stayed in contact and in the end he offered me the possibility to pursue a PhD on diabetes in LMICs. So this is how I ended up at the University of East Anglia in Norwich studying the economics of diabetes.

Which sources of data did you use for your analyses, and how was your experience of using them?

I exclusively used household survey data that was publicly available. In my master’s thesis, I had already worked with the Mexican Family Life Survey, which is quite an extensive household survey covering many socioeconomic as well as health-related topics. I ended up using it for two of my thesis chapters. The nice thing about it is that it has a panel structure now with three waves, and the last waves also included information on HbA1c levels – a biomarker used to infer on blood glucose levels over the last three months – that I could use to detect people with undiagnosed diabetes in the survey. The second source of data was the China Health and Nutrition Survey, which has many of the same qualities, with even more waves of data. There are more and more surveys with high-quality data coming out so it will be exciting to explore them further in the future.

How did you try to identify the effects of diabetes as separate from other influences?

As in many other fields, there is great worry that diabetes might be endogenous when trying to investigate its relationship with economic outcomes. For example, personal characteristics (such as ambition) could affect your likelihood to be employed or your wage, but maybe also your exercise levels and consequently your risk to develop diabetes. Unfortunately, such things are very difficult to measure so that they often remain unobserved. Similarly, changes in income or job status could affect lifestyles that in turn could change the risk to develop diabetes, making estimates prone to selection biases and reverse causality. To deal with this, I used several strategies. In my first paper on Mexico, I used a commonly used instrumental variable strategy. My instrument was parental diabetes and we argued that, given our control variables, it was unrelated to employment status but predicted diabetes in the children due to the genetic component of diabetes. In the second paper on Mexico, I used fixed effects estimation to control for any time-invariant confounding. This strategy does not need an instrument, however, unobserved time-variant confounding or reverse causality may still be a problem. I tackled the latter in my last paper on the effect of diabetes on employment and behavioural outcomes in China, using a methodology mainly used in epidemiology called marginal structural models, which uses inverse probability weighting to account for the selection into diabetes on previous values of the outcomes of interest, e.g. changes in employment status or weight. Of course, in the absence of a true experiment, it still remains difficult to truly establish causality using observational data, so one still needs to be careful to not over-interpret these findings.

The focus of your PhD was on middle-income countries. Does diabetes present particular economic challenges in this setting?

Well, over the last 30 years many middle-income countries, especially in Asia but also Latin America, have gone from diabetes rates much below high-income countries to surpassing them. China today has about 100 million people with diabetes, sporting the largest diabetes population worldwide. While, as countries become richer, first the economically better-off populations tend to have a higher diabetes prevalence, in many middle-income countries diabetes is now affecting, in particular, the middle class and the poor, who often lack the financial resources to access treatment or to even be diagnosed. Consequently, many remain poorly treated and develop diabetes complications that can lead to amputations, loss of vision and cardiovascular problems. Once these complications appear, the associated medical expenditures can represent a very large economic burden, and as I have shown in this thesis, can also lead to income losses because people lose their jobs.

What advice would you give to policymakers looking to minimise the economic burden of diabetes?

The policy question is always the most difficult one, but I’ll try to give some answers. The results of the thesis suggest that there is a considerable economic burden of diabetes which disproportionately affects the poor, the uninsured and women. Further, many people remain undiagnosed and some of the results of the biomarker analysis I conducted in one of my papers suggest that diagnosis likely often happens too late to prevent adverse health outcomes. Therefore, earlier diagnosis may help to reduce the burden, the problem is that once people are diagnosed they will also need treatment, and it appears that even now many do not receive appropriate treatment. Therefore, simply aiming to diagnose more people will not be sufficient. Policymakers in these countries will need to make sure that they will also be able to offer treatment to everybody, in particular the disadvantaged groups. Otherwise, inequities will likely become even greater and healthcare systems even more overburdened. How this can be achieved is another question and more research will be needed. Promising areas could be a greater integration of diabetes treatment into the existing health care systems specialised in treating communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, which often are related to diabetes. This would both improve treatment and likely limit the amount of additional costs. Of course, investments in early life health, nutrition and education will also help to reduce the burden by improving health and thereby economic possibilities, so that people may never become diabetic or at least have better possibilities to cope with the disease.