Measuring Health Effects of the Great Recession

University Of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Despite long-standing evidence of strong gradients of increasingly better health from the lowest to the highest levels of socioeconomic status (SES), the causal nature of SES-health relationships has not been clearly established, and mechanisms underlying the relationships are not well understood. Beginning in 2008, the Great Recession was a major, and largely unanticipated, economic shock that impacted the vast majority of Americans and its impact on health has the potential to provide scientific evidence on the causal impact of SES on health. Assuming the timing and magnitude of the recession was largely unanticipated, the Great Recession can be treated as an exogenous economic shock that offers enhanced opportunities to establish the extent to which there are causal effects of SES on health. This R21 will empirically evaluate whether uniquely rich longitudinal, objective biological data (reflecting physiological processes linked to major morbidity and mortality) measured for the same 4,655 individuals before and after the Recession can be used to establish health effects of the Recession. These data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) will be linked with time-varying area- and age-sex-race-education-specific measures of the local labor and housing markets (with over 200 zip-codes for housing markets and at least 200 location-specific demographic subgroups for labor markets). Four waves of MESA data were collected before Fall 2008 (onset of the Recession) with a 5th exam between July 2010 and December 2011. In contrast to the self-report health data used in much prior work on health effects of economic downturns, MESA offers the unique strength of standardized, objective assessments of major physiological markers of health, including systolic blood pressure, pulse pressure, blood glucose, serum lipids, body mass index and waist-hip ratio. Combining these rich health data with economic status measured on the same individuals before and after the onset of the Great Recession, and with local area- and demographic-specific exposures to the recession provides unparalleled opportunities to evaluate the effects of economic stress on objectively assessed and important health markers. The research will describe how these health markers change over time and how they change as exposure to area- and demographic-specific economic stress varies. This R21 is designed to provide initial evidence to establish feasibility and power for a larger, more comprehensive investigation (R01) of the impact of the Great Recession on biology (including new biomarkers assayed from stored blood samples), behaviors (e.g., exercise, smoking, heavy drinking), subclinical disease (e.g., carotid and peripheral atherosclerosis), overt disease (e.g., cardiovascular events, hospitalizations), and total mortality. Moreover, extensive MESA genetics data will also allow exploration of possible gene-by-environment (Recession) interaction effects in future work.