New Delhi: Large and sudden financial losses significantly raise the risk of death, according to a study released on Tuesday and described as the first to probe the impacts of "negative wealth shocks" on people's life expectancy.
Health researchers in the US have found that negative wealth shocks - defined as the loss of 75 per cent or more of personal wealth within two years - is associated with an increase in mortality from all causes.
The researchers, who tracked the wealth and health of over 8,700 participants above the age of 50 years for an average of 17 years, found the death rate among people who experienced negative wealth shocks was 64 per 1,000 person-years, compared to 30 per 1,000 person-years among those who had positive wealth growth without any shocks, positive or negative.
The study's findings were published on Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a research journal. A person-year is a measure combining the number of people and the number of years.
Declining financial resources can result in reduced spending on health-related goods and services and delaying needed medical care and incomplete adherence to prescribed medication can have long-term health consequences, including increased mortality, the researchers said.
"We found losing your life-savings has a profound effect on a person's long-term health," Lindsay Pool, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and lead author of the study, said in a media release.
Over the study's two decades, the researchers found about 25 per cent of Americans had experienced a wealth shock.
The new findings bolster existing evidence about the health impacts of losing money. Multiple earlier studies have already suggested that negative wealth shocks can contribute to depression, anxiety, impaired cardiovascular health and suicide in affected people.
"Our findings offer new evidence for a potentially important social determinant of health that so far has not been recognised - sudden loss of wealth in late middle or older age," said Carlos Mendes de Leon, a professor of global public health at Michigan's School of Public Health and the study's senior author.
The researchers say the enhanced risk of death may be explained by either of two pathways. "These people suffer a mental health toll because of the financial loss as well as pulling back from medical care because they can't afford it," Pool said in the release.
Among the 8,714 participants tracked over the two decades from 1994 to 2014, the study found 2,430 participants (26 per cent) experienced negative wealth shocks. Among the participants, 749 had what researchers defined as "asset poverty" - either zero or negative net worth - at the start.
"The most surprising finding was that having wealth and losing it is almost as bad for life expectancy as never having wealth," Pool said. The death rate among those who had asset poverty at the start of the study was 73 per 1,000 person-years.
The researchers said the initial levels of net worth did not appear to influence the association between negative wealth shocks and mortality. In other words, the risk that sudden and large financial loss puts to life expectancy does not change with a person's initial net worth.
A public health researcher in India said the findings might be used to underscore the importance of universal health care. Medical studies have suggested that roughly 60 million people in India are pushed into poverty because of catastrophic health expenses.
"If families lose all their households' savings on health care, these findings imply that there could be health consequences for others in the family," said a senior researcher who specialises on universal health-care studies at the Public Health Foundation of India, a New Delhi-based research and education institution.
