Family health effects: complements or substitutes

Abstract

Genetic endowments play a fundamental role in the production of health. At birth individuals have different capacities to be healthy, largely due to genetic dispositions. Whether or not individuals realize this health depends on their choice of health behaviours. Previous research has linked negative factors beyond the individual's control, which include genetic endowments, to both poor health and poor health behaviours. The health economics literature proposes that behaviours and genetic (or family health) endowments can be either substitutes or complements in the production of health. The goal of this paper is to investigate the behavioural consequences of changes in knowledge about one's genetic endowment. Using two waves of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey I Epidemiologic Followup Study, I find that for smokers, smoking intensity substitutes for newly diagnosed smoking-related family cancers, while smoking intensity is complementary to newly diagnosed non-smoking-related family cancers. I find no evidence for the hypothesized relationships with respect to alcohol consumption among drinkers. These results have implications for the growing field of genetic testing and test development. These results also reinforce current practices of ascertaining family health histories in the context of medical history taking.

The Impact of Receiving Predictive Genetic Information about Lynch Syndrome on Individual Colonoscopy and Smoking Behaviors

“…These empirical findings were consistent with the hypotheses generated from our simple health economics model. They also agreed well with previous studies that reported substitutive effects between genetic endowments and personal health behaviours in economic (38,39,40) and clinical (16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23) literature. They were also congruent with a previous study that reported modulating effects of previous cancer diagnosis (32).…”

Non‐pecuniary returns to higher education: the effect on smoking intensity in the UK

“…Similarly, Lahiri and Song (2000) find a negative correlation between the propensity of getting smoking-related diseases and the propensity of continuing to smoke. Ganz (2001) finds that smoking is a substitute for a newly discovered risk of cancer (i.e. a lower genetic endowment) measured in terms of cancer family history.…”

Substitutes or complements? Diagnosis and treatment with non-conventional and conventional medicine

“…To find the relationship between CAM and WM, two linear equations are estimated, based on several control variables. This econometric approach to test the complementarity of goods and services in health has been used before (55)(56)(57)(58). The dependent variables of the econometric model are CAMtreat and CAMdiagn.…”