An estimated 210,000 girls may have “gone missing” due to China’s “Later, Longer, Fewer” campaign, a birth planning policy predating the One Child Policy, according to a new study led by Stanford Health Policy researchers published by the Center for Global Development.

The study looked at hundreds of thousands of births occurring before and during the “Later, Longer, Fewer” policy to measure its effect on marriage, fertility, and sex selection behavior. The policy, which began in the 1970s and preceded China's One-Child Policy, promoted later marriage, longer gaps between successive children, and having fewer children to cut the country's population. The study emphasizes that because this policy existed before ultrasound technology was widely available — and therefore before selective abortion was an option — these missing girls must have been due to postnatal neglect of infant girls, or in the extreme, infanticide.

The authors of the new study are Grant Miller, director of the Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development, a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Kimberly Babiarz, a research scholar at Stanford Health Policy; Paul Ma and Shige Song.

The researchers found that China’s “Longer, Later, Fewer” population control policy reduced total fertility rates by 0.9 births per woman and was directly responsible for an estimated 210,000 missing girls countrywide. The phenomenon of “missing girls” widely recognized in later years under the One Child Policy is largely thought due to sex-selective abortion after ultrasound technology spread across China.

“Prior research has shown that sex ratios rose dramatically under China's One-Child Policy, leading to stark imbalances in the numbers of men and women. But we’re finding that girls went missing earlier than previously thought, which can in part be directly attributed to birth planning policy that predates the One-Child Policy,” said Grant Miller, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development.

The top findings of the study include:

• The birth planning policy reduced fertility by 0.9 births per woman, explaining 28 percent of the overall decline during this period.

• The Later, Longer, Fewer policy is responsible for a roughly twofold increase in the use of “fertility stopping rules,” the practice of continuing to have children until the desired number of sons is achieved.

• The Later, Longer, Fewer policy is also responsible for an increase in postnatal neglect, from none to 0.3 percent of all female births in China during this period.

• Sex selection behavior was concentrated among couples with the highest demand for sons (couples that have more children but no sons), with sex ratios reaching 117 males per 100 female births among these couples.

“Population control strategies can have unforeseen consequences and human costs,” Miller said. “At the same time, as China debates the future of birth planning policies, it’s also important to note that family planning policy does not appear to be the largest driver of fertility.”

Most studies that look at whether democracy improves global health rely on measurements of life expectancy at birth and infant mortality rates. Yet those measures disproportionately reflect progress on infectious diseases — such as malaria, diarrheal illnesses and pneumonia — which relies heavily on foreign aid.

A new study led by Stanford Health Policy's Tara Templin and the Council on Foreign Relations suggests that a better way to measure the role of democracy in public health is to examine the causes of adult mortality, such as noncommunicable diseases, HIV, cardiovascular disease and transportation injuries. Little international assistance targets these noncommunicable diseases. 

When the researchers measured improvements in those particular areas of public health, the results proved dramatic.

“The results of this study suggest that elections and the health of the people are increasingly inseparable,” the authors wrote.

A paper describing the findings was published today in The Lancet. Templin, a graduate student in the Department of Health Research and Policy, shares lead authorship with Thomas Bollyky, JD, director of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Democratic institutions and processes, and particularly free and fair elections, can be an important catalyst for improving population health, with the largest health gains possible for cardiovascular and other noncommunicable diseases,” the authors wrote.

Templin said the study brings new data to the question of how governance and health inform global health policy debates, particularly as global health funding stagnates.

“As more cases of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancers occur in low- and middle-income countries, there will be a need for greater health-care infrastructure and resources to provide chronic care that weren’t as critical in providing childhood vaccines or acute care,” Templin said.

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Free and fair elections for better health

In 2016, the four mortality causes most ameliorated by democracy — cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, transportation injuries and other noncommunicable diseases — were responsible for 25 percent of total death and disability in people younger than 70 in low- and middle-income countries. That same year, cardiovascular diseases accounted for 14 million deaths in those countries, 42 percent of which occurred in individuals younger than 70.

Over the past 20 years, the increase in democratic experience reduced mortality in these countries from cardiovascular disease, other noncommunicable diseases and tuberculosis between 8-10 percent, the authors wrote.

“Free and fair elections appear important for improving adult health and noncommunicable disease outcomes, most likely by increasing government accountability and responsiveness,” the study said.

The researchers used data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study; V-Dem; and Financing Global Health databases. The data cover 170 countries from 1970 to 2015.

What Templin and her co-authors found was democracy was associated with better noncommunicable disease outcomes. They hypothesize that democracies may give higher priority to health-care investments.

HIV-free life expectancy at age 15, for example, improved significantly — on average by 3 percent every 10 years during the study period — after countries transitioned to democracy. Democratic experience also explains significant improvements in mortality from cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, transportation injuries, cancers, cirrhosis and other noncommunicable diseases, the study said.

Watch: Some of the authors of the study discuss the significant their findings: 

What Templin and her co-authors found was democracy was associated with better noncommunicable disease outcomes. They hypothesize that democracies may give higher priority to health-care investments.

HIV-free life expectancy at age 15, for example, improved significantly — on average by 3 percent every 10 years during the study period — after countries transitioned to democracy. Democratic experience also explains significant improvements in mortality from cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, transportation injuries, cancers, cirrhosis and other noncommunicable diseases, the study said.

Foreign aid often misdirected

And yet, this connection between fair elections and global health is little understood.

“Democratic government has not been a driving force in global health,” the researchers wrote.  “Many of the countries that have had the greatest improvements in life expectancy and child mortality over the past 15 years are electoral autocracies that achieved their health successes with the heavy contribution of foreign aid.”

They note that Ethiopia, Myanmar, Rwanda and Uganda all extended their life expectancy by 10 years or more between 1996 and 2016. The governments of these countries were elected, however, in multiparty elections designed so the opposition could only lose, making them among the least democratic nations in the world.

Yet these nations were among the top two-dozen recipients of foreign assistance for health.

Only 2 percent of the total development assistance for health in 2016 was devoted to noncommunicable diseases, which was the cause of 58 percent of the death and disability in low-income and middle-income countries that same year, the researchers found.

“Although many bilateral aid agencies emphasize the importance of democratic governance in their policy statements,” the authors wrote, “most studies of development assistance have found no correlation between foreign aid and democratic governance and, in some instance, a negative correlation.”

Autocracies such as Cuba and China, known for providing good health care at low cost, have not always been as successful when their populations’ health needs shifted to treating and preventing noncommunicable diseases. A 2017 assessment, for example, found that true life expectancy in China was lower than its expected life expectancy at birth from 1980 to 2000 and has only improved over the past decade with increased government health spending. In Cuba, the degree to which its observed life expectancy has exceeded expectations has decreased, from four-to-seven years higher than expected in 1970 to three-to-five years higher than expected in 2016.

“There is good reason to believe that the role that democracy plays in child health and infectious diseases may not be generalizable to the diseases that disproportionately affect adults,” Bollyky said. Cardiovascular diseases, cancers and other noncommunicable diseases, according to Bollyky, are largely chronic, costlier to treat than most infectious diseases, and require more health care infrastructure and skilled medical personnel.  

The researchers hypothesize that democracy improves population health because:

1. When enforced through regular, free and fair elections, democracies should have a greater incentive than autocracies to provide health-promoting resources and services to a larger proportion of the population;
2. Democracies are more open to feedback from a broader range of interest groups, more protective of media freedom and might be more willing to use that feedback to improve their public health programs;
3. Autocracies reduce political competition and access to information, which might deter constituent feedback and responsive governance.

Various studies have concluded that democratic rule is better for population health, but almost all of them have focused on infant and child mortality or life expectancy at birth.

Over the past 20 years, the average country’s increase in democracy reduced mortality from cardiovascular disease by roughly 10 percent, the authors wrote. They estimate that more than 16 million cardiovascular deaths may have been averted due to an increase in democracy globally from 1995 to 2015. They also found improvements in other health burdens in the countries where democracy has taken hold: an 8.9 percent reduction in deaths from tuberculosis, a 9.5 percent drop in deaths from transportation injuries and a 9.1 percent mortality reduction in other noncommunicable disease, such as congenital heart disease and congenital birth defects.

“This study suggests that democratic governance and its promotion, along with other government accountability measures, might further enhance efforts to improve population health,” the study said. “Pretending otherwise is akin to believing that the solution to a nation’s crumbling roads and infrastructure is just a technical schematic and cheaper materials.”

The other researchers who contributed to the study are Matthew Cohen, Diana Schoder, Joseph Dieleman and Simon Wigley, from CFR, the University of Washington-Seattle and Bilkent University in Turkey, respectively.

Funding for the research came from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Stanford’s Department of Health Research and Policy also supported the work.

Something as simple as, "Are you taking your medications?" could conceivably prolong a life.

The study, detailed in a new working paper released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, was co-authored by Petra Persson, an assistant professor of economics; Maria Polyakova, an assistant professor of health economics at Stanford School of Medicine and core faculty at Stanford Health Policy; and Yiqun Chen, a doctoral student in health economics at Stanford School of Medicine. Persson and Polyakova are both faculty fellows at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

Their study tackles the issue of health inequality and specifically examines the effects of having access to informal health expertise by having a doctor or nurse in the family. It finds that those with relatives in the health profession are 10 percent more likely to live beyond age 80. They are also significantly less likely to have chronic lifestyle-related conditions, such as heart attacks, heart failure and diabetes.

Younger relatives within the extended family also see gains: They are more likely to have been vaccinated, and they have fewer hospital admissions and a lower prevalence of drug or alcohol addiction.

In addition, the closer the relatives are to their familial medical source – either geographically or within the family tree – the more pronounced the impact of the health benefits, according to the findings.

The researchers used data from Sweden, where lotteries were used in the early 2000s to break ties among equally qualified applicants for admission into medical schools. The researchers then compared the health of the family members of lottery winners against lottery losers – a setup similar to a randomized control trial.

The strong findings of health benefits funneled from a familial sphere of medical knowledge suggest it would be worth ramping up access to health expertise in our health care system, the researchers say.

A doctor, for instance, could prescribe statins – a type of drug known to lower the risk of heart attacks – but whether the patient continues taking it from day to day is a decision made at home.

“Our work shows that there is a lot of value in trying to improve people’s decisions about their investment in their own health,” Persson says.

“If the government and health care system, including public and private insurers, could mimic what goes on inside families, then we could reduce health inequality by as much as 18 percent,” she says, referring to a main finding of the study.

Intra-family transmissions of health-related expertise might encompass frequent nagging to adhere to prescribed medications, get vaccinations or refrain from smoking during pregnancy, and “these behavioral changes are – from a society’s perspective – simple and cheap,” the study states.

Disparity despite access

The study also reveals limitations to the impact of equal access to medical care, underscoring the importance of other health efforts.

The researchers compared mortality data of Sweden – where there is universal access to health care – to the United States. They found the overall mortality was lower in Sweden but the level of health inequality largely mirrored that of the United States. In Sweden, despite its extensive social safety net, the rich also live longer and the poor die younger. Specifically, among people alive at age 55, more than 40 percent of individuals at the bottom of the income distribution in Sweden will have died by age 80 – as opposed to fewer than 25 percent for those at the top of the distribution.

“This health inequality appears to be extremely stubborn,” Persson says. “We can throw a universal health insurance system at it and yet substantial inequality persists. So, is there anything else that can help us close that health gap between rich and poor?”

According to their latest research, yes.

Health effects from having a medical professional in the family were substantial and occurred across the income spectrum, according to the study. And because the effects from the exposure to medical expertise was often even stronger for those at the lower half of the income distribution, the researchers estimated that information-driven behaviors could make a significant difference in getting rid of health disparities.

Closer ties, less churn

The study did not examine the complexity of family dynamics or specific actions that led to the positive health effects, but the researchers hypothesize that the mere presence of a medical professional in the family translates somehow to either a heightened health culture or, at least, having a coach of sorts to encourage healthy, good-patient behavior.

Although general public health campaigns (e.g., “Get Your Flu Shot Today!”) may not carry the same level of influence as intimate dinner-table discussions or persistent prodding among family members, there could be other ways society can improve its exposure to medical expertise to lead to healthier, longer lives, the researchers say.

Community health worker or nurse outreach programs can perhaps lead to more targeted, personalized communication efforts, they say. Digital nudges delivered through mobile phone apps could potentially make healthy dents.

Reminders of preventive care can also come by way of closer patient-doctor relationships and more consistent, longer-term ties to the same doctor.

“The idea of continuity of care and developing a true relationship with your doctor, who becomes someone who pays attention to you as an individual and sees you and your family over a long period of time, is well known,” Polyakova says. “Today, it’s what they might call old-fashioned primary care, where the whole family goes to the same doctor for many years. Many countries, the U.S. included, appear to be moving increasingly away from this model, and our results suggest that we might want to do the reverse.”

The finding of how a closer family connection or closer proximity leads to even stronger health outcomes helps substantiate the potential difference a closer bond between any doctor and patient could make – improvements that would be hard to glean from rushed and infrequent medical appointments, Persson and Polyakova say.

Communication-focused health initiatives don’t have to come with hefty price tags either, they say.

“We pour a lot of resources into getting even fancier machines inside hospitals, but the things that are making a difference here are not that expensive,” Persson says of their findings. “These are cheap, easily scalable preventative investments that are translating to gains in longevity, which is remarkable.”

Sweden’s medical school lotteries

Using large-scale data from Sweden, the researchers focused on quantifying the role of informal exposure to health expertise via a medical professional in the family while avoiding results that would be muddled with other differences between individuals with and without a doctor in the family.

The researchers used two different approaches. First, they took advantage of the fact that in some years, lotteries were used to break ties among equally qualified applicants to Sweden’s medical schools. This allowed the researchers to use medical school application records and track the health of family members of applicants who won and lost the lottery.

The researchers looked at more than 30 years of continuous health and tax records spanning four generations of family members, and examined health-related outcomes of the extended family members of newly trained doctors and nurses – including their siblings, parents, grandparents, children, aunts, uncles, cousins and in-laws.

Second, researchers sought to double-check whether higher income and higher social status associated with the medical profession had anything to do with the positive health benefits they found.

One of the ways they did this was to draw a comparison to lawyers, a similarly paid profession. The parents of doctors, they found, were 16 percent more likely to be alive than the parents of lawyers 20 years after their children matriculated. The parents of doctors also faced lower prospects of lifestyle-related chronic diseases.

In addition to the higher likelihood of their parents living past age 80 and the lower likelihood of heart diseases, the relatives of health professionals showed higher levels of preventive behaviors, including purchases of heart and blood-thinning medications, and vaccinations for HPV, or human papillomavirus. Younger family members also had fewer hospital admissions and addiction cases.

“People with health professionals in the family essentially make preventative investments that everyone should be doing,” Persson says.

Opioids overdoses now kill more Americans than car accidents or guns, with more than 350,000 Americans having succumbed to the painkillers since 2000.

“The opioid misuse and overdose crisis touches everyone in the United States,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in this recent report. “The effects of the opioid crisis are cumulative and costly for our society — an estimated $504 billion a year in 2015 — placing burdens on families, workplaces, the health care system, states, and communities.”

Now, new research led by Stanford shows that not only have opioid-related deaths jumped fourfold in the last 20 years, but that those most affected by the epidemic, and where they live, has also shifted dramatically. In fact, the District of Columbia has had the fastest rate of increase in mortality from opioids, more than tripling every year since 2013.

“Although opioid-related mortality has been stereotyped as a rural, low-income phenomenon concentrated among Appalachian or midwestern states, it has spread rapidly, particularly among the eastern states,” writes Mathew V. Kiang, ScD, a research fellow at the Center for Population Health Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, in an original investigation published in JAMA Network Open.

The study found the highest rates of opioid-related deaths and more rapid increases in mortality were observed in eight states: Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio. Two states, Florida and Pennsylvania, had opioid-related mortality rates that were doubling every two years — and tripling in Washington, D.C.

Kiang and his co-authors, including Stanford Health Policy’s Sanjay Basu, MD, PhD,an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford Medicine, used data from the National Center for Health Statistics and corresponding population estimates from the U.S. Census. The other authors are Jarvis Chen, ScD, at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Monica Alexander, PhD, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

“It seems there has been a vast increase in synthetic opioid deaths in the eastern states and especially in the District of Columbia because illicit drugs are often tainted with fentanyl or other synthetic opioids,” Kiang said in an interview.  “People aren’t aware their drugs are laced and more potent than they expected — putting them at higher risk of overdose.”

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Synthetic opioid deaths now outnumber heroin deaths in these eastern states, which suggests fentanyl has spread to other illegal drugs and is no longer limited to heroin.

“The identification and characterization of opioid `hot spots’ — in terms of both high mortality rates and increasing trends in mortality — may allow for better-targeted policies that address the current state of the epidemic and the needs of the population,” the authors write.

The research suggests the opioid epidemic has evolved as three intertwined, but distinct waves, based on the types of opioids associated with mortality:

1. The first wave of opioid-related deaths was associated with prescription painkillers from the 1990s until about 2010.
2. From 2010 until the present, the second wave was associated with a large increase in heroin-related deaths.
3. And in the third and current wave, which began around 2013, the rapid increase is associated with illicitly manufactured synthetic opioids, such as tramadol and fentanyl.

“The evolution has also seen a wider range of populations being affected, with the spread of the epidemic from rural to urban areas and considerable increases in opioid-related mortality observed in the black population,” they write.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that African-Americans experienced the largest increase in opioid overdose deaths among any racial group from 2016 to 2017, with a 26 percent surge.

“The identification and characterization of opioid ‘hot spots’ — in terms of both high mortality rates and increasing trends in mortality — may allow for better-targeted policies that address the current state of the epidemic and the needs of the population,” the researchers write.

States are trying to combat the epidemic by enacting policies, such as restricting the supply of prescription drugs and expanding treatment and access to the overdose-reversing drug naloxone.

“Treating opioid use as a disorder should be our top priority to curb the problem,” said Kiang. “Similarly, we have the ability that counteract the effects of an overdose — these life-saving drugs should be easily accessible and widely available.”