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This paper investigates how restriction policies have impacted elderly self-assessed health (SAH) in Europe during the pandemic, and how the Covid-19 infection interacts with policy stringency to modulate the SAH deterioration. Using the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) between October 2019 and August 2021, including 9,034 adults aged 50 years and above, alongside with a stringency index from the Oxford's Coronavirus Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), we design both an adjusted probit model and a recursive bivariate probit model to test for endogeneity of Covid-19 infection. Estimations results show a bell curve between stringency and SAH degradation: a deleterious effect of restrictions at low levels of stringency up to a tipping point after which more stringent policies become protective. Covid-19 infection moderates this association. Depending on individuals' initial health, the effect of restrictions is uneven: highly stringent policies become damaging for individuals most likely to enter a vulnerabilization path, for whom the bell curve is thus inverted. Overall, this study shows clear patterns of association between policy stringency and perceived health among older Europeans, and highlights the potential trade-off between targeting as many people as possible, those in poor health or those on the edge of vulnerability., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Background: A work accident constitutes a shock to health, likely to alter mental states and affect the use of psychotropic drugs. We focus on the use of benzodiazepines, which are a class of drugs commonly used to treat anxiety and insomnia. Prolonged use can lead to dependence. Our objective is to determine the extent to which work accidents lead to benzodiazepine use and overuse (i.e. exceedance of medical guidelines)., Method: We use a two-step selection model (the Heckman method) based on data from the French National Health Data System (Système National des Données de Santé, SNDS). Our study sample includes all general plan members who experienced a single work accident in 2016 (and not since 2007). This sample includes 350,000 individuals in the work accident group and more than 1.1 million people randomly drawn from the population without work accidents from 2007 to 2017 (the non-work accident group)., Results: The occurrence of a work accident leads to an increase in benzodiazepine use and overuse the following year. The selection model shows a clear influence of the accident on the use probability (+ 39%), but a very slight impact on the risk of overuse among users (+ 1.7%), once considered the selection effect. The effect on overuse risk is higher for more severe accidents and among women., Conclusion: The increase in the risk of benzodiazepine overuse is due to an increase in the likelihood of using benzodiazepines after a work accident that leads to overuse, rather than an increase in likelihood of overuse among people who use benzodiazepines. Results call for targeting the first-time prescription to limit the risk of overuse after a work accident., (© 2023. Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Purpose: The intended clinical value of frailty screening is to identify unfit patients needing geriatric assessment (GA) and to prevent unnecessary GA in fit patients. These hypotheses rely on the sensitivity and specificity of screening tests, but they have not been verified., Methods: We performed a cross-sectional analysis of outpatients age ≥ 70 years with prostate, breast, colorectal, or lung cancer included in the ELCAPA cohort study (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02884375) between February 2007 and December 2019. The diagnostic accuracy of the G8 Geriatric Screening Tool (G8) and modified G8 scores for identifying unfit patients was determined on the basis of GA results. We used decision curve analysis to calculate the benefit of frailty screening for detecting unfit patients and avoiding unnecessary GA in fit patients across different threshold probabilities., Results: We included 1,648 patients (median age, 81 years), and 1,428 (87%) were unfit. The sensitivity and specificity were, respectively, 85% (95% CI, 84 to 87) and 59% (95% CI, 57 to 61) for G8, and 86% (95% CI, 84 to 87) and 60% (95% CI, 58 to 63) for the modified G8 score. For decision curve analysis, the net benefit (NB) for identifying unfit patients were 0.72 for G8, 0.72 for the modified G8, and 0.82 for GA at a threshold probability of 0.25. At a threshold probability of 0.33, the NBs were 0.71, 0.72, and 0.80, respectively. At a threshold probability of 0.5, the NBs were 0.68, 0.69, and 0.73, respectively. No screening tool reduced unnecessary GA in fit patients at predefined threshold probabilities., Conclusion: Although frailty screening tests showed good diagnostic accuracy, screening showed no clinical benefits over the GA-for-all strategy. NB approaches, in addition to diagnostic accuracy, are necessary to assess the clinical value of tests.

The guidelines on prostate cancer treatment in older men recommend evaluating the patient's underlying health status before treatment selection. We aimed to evaluate the frequency of a guideline-discordant treatment (GDT), identify factors associated with GDT, and assess the relationship between GDT and overall survival. We studied patients with prostate cancer aged 70 or older included in the ELCAPA cohort between 2010 and 2019. Multivariable logistic regression assessed GDT-associated factors. The restricted mean survival time (RMST) assessed the 24- and 36-month OS using stabilized inverse probability of treatment weighting of propensity scores. We included 356 patients (median age: 81 years), and 164 (46%) received a GDT (95% confidence interval (CI) = (41-51%)). Patients with metastases were less likely to receive a GDT (adjusted odds ratio (95% CI) = 0.34 (0.17-0.69); p = 0.003). After weighting, the RMST at 24 months was shorter in the GDT group (13.9 months, vs. 17 months for compliant treatments; difference (95% CI): -3.1 months (-5.3, -1.0); p = 0.004). RMST at 36 months was 18.5 months, vs. 21.8 months (difference: -3.3 months (-6.7, 0.0); p = 0.053). GDT is common in older patients with prostate cancer and especially those with non-metastatic disease. GDT was associated with worse survival, independently of health status and tumour characteristics.

Only limited data are available in France on the incidence and health expenditure of type 2 diabetes. The objective of this study, based on national health insurance administrative database, is to describe the expenditure reimbursed to patients newly treated for type 2 diabetes and the proportion of expenditure attributable to diabetes. The study is conducted over a 6-year period from 2008, the year of incidence of treated diabetes, to 2014. Type 2 diabetic patients aged 45 years and older are identified on the basis of their drug consumption. To estimate expenditure attributable to diabetes, a matched control group is selected among more than 13 million beneficiaries over 44 years old not taking antidiabetic treatment. The expenditure attributable to diabetes is estimated by two methods: simple comparison of reimbursed health expenditure between both groups, and a difference-in-differences method including control variables. The cohort of incident type 2 diabetic patients comprises 170,013 patients in 2008. Mean global reimbursed expenditure is €4700 per patient in 2008 and €5500 in 2015. Expenditure attributable to diabetes, estimated by direct comparison with controls, is €1500 in the first year. We, thus, observe a decrease in the following year due to decreased hospitalisations, and then expenditure increase by an average of 7% per year to reach €1900 in the eighth year after the initiation of treatment.

This paper presents the first evaluation of the French Disabled Workers Act of 1987, which aimed to promote the employment of disabled people in the private sector. We use a panel data set, which includes both the health and the labour market histories of workers. We account both for unobserved heterogeneity and for the change in the disabled population over time. We find that the law had a negative impact on the employment of disabled workers in the private sector. This counterproductive effect likely comes from the possibility to pay a fine instead of hiring disabled workers.

The economists interest in the relationships between health and work by studying three relations: the negative effect of the poor health on the position on the labor market, the positive influence of work on health but also the role of hard working conditions and employment on health status. If the international literature is plentiful, the French literature is more recent. In France, the effects of health events are more penalizing on the professional career when they onset in second part of career inviting in the implementation of a premature prevention in companies. The studies also underline fragile populations such as the anxious men., (© 2016 médecine/sciences – Inserm.)

Economists have traditionally been very cautious when studying the interaction between employment and health because of the two-way causal relationship between these two variables: health status influences the probability of being employed and, at the same time, working affects the health status. Because these two variables are determined simultaneously, researchers control endogeneity skews (e.g., reverse causality, omitted variables) when conducting empirical analysis. With these caveats in mind, the literature finds that a favourable work environment and high job security lead to better health conditions. Being employed with appropriate working conditions plays a protective role on physical health and psychiatric disorders. By contrast, non-employment and retirement are generally worse for mental health than employment, and overemployment has a negative effect on health. These findings stress the importance of employment and of adequate working conditions for the health of workers. In this context, it is a concern that a significant proportion of European workers (29 %) would like to work fewer hours because unwanted long hours are likely to signal a poor level of job satisfaction and inadequate working conditions, with detrimental effects on health. Thus, in Europe, labour-market policy has increasingly paid attention to job sustainability and job satisfaction. The literature clearly invites employers to take better account of the worker preferences when setting the number of hours worked. Overall, a specific "flexicurity" (combination of high employment protection, job satisfaction and active labour-market policies) is likely to have a positive effect on health.

While theoretical models on long-term care decisions assume that the health production function of dependent elderly depends positively on the care received, it has not received much attention in the empirical literature. We estimate the effects of both informal and formal home care on the mental health of elderly individuals in France needing help with daily activities. We adjust for the endogeneity of care with instrumental variables, using characteristics of adult children and geographical disparities in access to public long-term care coverage. The results show that informal care reduces the risk of depression of dependent elderly and that formal care increases their general mental health., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The assumption according to which ill individuals can be replaced at work that underpins the 'friction cost method' (FCM) to value productivity costs has been primarily discussed within the framework of cost-utility analysis. This paper investigates the consequences of this assumption for cost-benefit analysis (CBA). It makes three contributions. First, it provides the first analytical account of the overall consequences of ill worker replacement on social welfare and it analyzes the associated compensation effects within a CBA framework. Second, it highlights a double counting problem that arises when ill worker replacement is assumed in the CBA of life-saving health care programs. To the best of our knowledge, no satisfactory solution to this problem has yet been provided in the literature. Third, this paper suggests and discusses two original ways to address this double counting issue. One consists in adjusting value of a statistical life estimations for the well-being provided by future incomes. Another possibility lies in the estimation of marginal rates of substitution between health and wealth so as to directly monetize the value of life over and above consumption. We show that both solutions raise unresolved questions that should be addressed in future research to enable appropriate use of the FCM in CBA.

Among 55-64 year olds, poor health is a reason for leaving the labour market early within the framework of schemes such as not only Early Retirement for Certain Employees (or Early Retirement for Asbestos Workers), but also by absence from the workforce (sick pay and disability pensions, respectively). It is interesting to single out the controlling factors for participation in or absence from the labour market after 50 and the link between poor health and employment status. The prevalence of functional limitations in everyday activities leads to a more pronounced exclusion of those over 50 years old from the labour market. Some of those aged between 55 and 59 on disability benefits become unemployed and do not look for work; in other words, they are potentially exempted from job-seeking. This would confirm the hypothesis that some of those exempted from job-seeking are in poor health.

Objectives: The absence of disease or disability and active involvement in society are considered as essential dimensions of successful ageing. To assess these concepts, we propose a new indicator the Healthy Working Life Expectancy (HWLE) that associates health status and productive engagement, in order to compare various situations in Europe., Design: The study population is drawn from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) which is the unique source of longitudinal data, providing comparable information between 1995 and 2001 on health and work statuses for a sample of some 60,000 household's representative of the population of: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. Based on the multi-state life table approach conventionally used for calculating healthy life expectancies, the HWLE corresponds to the number of years spent between the ages of 50 and 70 both in good health and at work., Results: In average, among the 20 years available between age 50 and age 70, the HWLE is 7.5 years for men and 4.8 years for women, ie, one half and one third respectively of the number of years spent in good health (14.1 and 13.5 years). The countries where the healthy working life expectancy of seniors is the highest are also the countries where the levels of employment of seniors are higher. Conversely, health status has only a weak influence on the HWLE indicator., Conclusion: These findings suggest the existence of a reservoir of healthy years which can be used to increase the length of the working life expectancy. They underline also the essential role that employment maintenance and retirement policies should have to increase the number of healthy years spent at work, and therefore guarantee a successful ageing for the seniors in Europe.