Abstract
Much of the literature that studies long-run effects of early-life economic conditions on health outcomes is based on pre-1940 birth cohorts. Early in these individuals’ lives, public social safety nets were at best rudimentary, and female labor force participation was relatively low. We complement the evidence by studying the effects of regional business cycle variations in the post-1950 Netherlands on cardiovascular disease risk in adulthood. We use data from Lifelines, a large cohort study that covers socio-economic, biological and health information from over 75,000 individuals aged between 20 and 63. Cardiovascular risk index is constructed from an extensive set of biomarkers. The results show that for women a 1 percentage point increase in the provincial unemployment level leads to a 0.02 percentage point increase in the risk of a fatal cardiovascular event in the coming 10 years while the effect in men is not significant. We conclude that women born in adverse economic conditions experience higher cardiovascular risk.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 77-84 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Social Science and Medicine |
| Volume | 224 |
| Early online date | 5 Feb 2019 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Mar 2019 |
Funding
The authors wish to acknowledge the services of the Lifelines Cohort Study, the contributing research centres delivering data to Lifelines, and all the study participants. Lifelines is a multi-disciplinary prospective population-based cohort study examining in a unique three-generation design the health and health-related behaviours of 167,729 persons living in the North East region of The Netherlands. It employs a broad range of investigative procedures in assessing the biomedical, socio-demographic, behavioural, physical and psychological factors which contribute to the health and disease of the general population, with a special focus on multimorbidity. In addition, the Lifelines project comprises a number of cross-sectional sub-studies which investigate specific age-related conditions. These include investigations into metabolic and hormonal diseases, including obesity, cardiovascular and renal diseases, pulmonary diseases and allergy, cognitive function and depression, and musculoskeletal conditions. The Lifelines Cohort Study, and generation and management of GWAS genotype data for the Lifelines Cohort Study is supported by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research NWO (grant 175.010.2007.006 ), the Economic Structure Enhancing Fund (FES) of the Dutch government , the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science , the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Sports , the Northern Netherlands Collaboration of Provinces (SNN) , the Province of Groningen , University Medical Center Groningen , the University of Groningen , Dutch Kidney Foundation and Dutch Diabetes Research Foundation . This study was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, grant Nr. 022.005.020 ) and benefitted from comments received at the NIDI/RUG conference, 2015, EUHEA conference 2016, IBEO workshop 2016, iHEA congress 2017, CINCH Academy, 2017 and RES junior symposium 2017. Special thanks to Tom Wansbeek for advice on econometrics. Appendix A
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Economic Structure Enhancing Fund | |
| Ministry for Health, Welfare and Sports | |
| Ministry of Education, Culture and Science | |
| Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research NWO | |
| Fusion Energy Sciences | |
| Rijksuniversiteit Groningen | |
| Nierstichting | |
| Diabetes Fonds | |
| Ministerie van Economische Zaken | |
| Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek | 175.010.2007.006 |
| Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen |
Keywords
- Biomarkers
- Developmental origins
- Early-life conditions
- Health
- Long-run effects
- Recession
- Unemployment
