Publication type
Journal Article
Series Number
Author
Publication date
December 15, 2025
Summary:
Using individual-level panel data from Understanding Society I estimate the response to a health risk realization on a healthy lifestyle index. To overcome the endogeneity of a diagnosis, I match on initial health risks. I find individuals improve their overall lifestyle healthiness when faced with a large negative health event such as a heart attack or diabetes diagnosis, interpreted as a precise signal about their health status, whereas they do not respond to a noisier signal through solely receiving information about certain health risk factors, such as a diagnosis of high blood pressure or angina (chest pain). The drivers of the overall effect are a decrease in the number of cigarettes smoked and an increase in not drinking alcohol; there is no significant effect found for either diet or exercise. I find some heterogeneity by sex, but only when looking at individual lifestyle behaviours. Overall, the findings suggest that the realization of a health risk leads individuals to improve their lifestyle behaviours, while only a noisier signal about their health risks leads to no such change.
Published in
PLoS ONE
Volume
Volume: 20
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0338311
ISSN
19326203
Subjects
Notes
© 2025 Zoey Verdun.
Open Access
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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