Join us January 21 at Noon ET for CLSA webinar, “How biomarkers of aging and self-reported health respond to guaranteed income: insights from the CLSA.” The webinar will be presented by Luke Duignan, M.Sc., and Dr. Daniel Dutton of Dalhousie University.
Biomarker-based measures of health, such as frailty indices or allostatic load, represent meaningful and digestible ways to quantify health and health risk. They also hold the potential to quantify improvements in health that may otherwise not manifest overtly for several years. Given this, the benefits of health interventions may be uniquely visible and measurable in this type of data.
One such intervention is government-sponsored guaranteed annual income. The relationship between income and health is well-established, but there is little Canadian evidence to say that giving people money on a large scale improves their health. Such a program exists today in the form of the Canadian public pension Old Age Security, but the health impact of transitioning to a pension is understudied in Canada.
This webinar presents the cumulative work from three projects using CLSA data to study the relationship between guaranteed income and health. We introduce allostatic load, a biomarker-based measure of health, and its relationship with established frailty indices. Secondly, we quantify allostatic load’s association with guaranteed annual income receipt and show these relationships to be constant over other metrics of functional health status. The result of this research adds new evidence for the potentially positive impact of large-scale economic interventions on health and health outcomes.
Luke Duignan is a third-year medical student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS. He previously obtained his M.Sc. in Epidemiology and Applied Health from Dalhousie, and a B.Sc. from St. Francis Xavier University. His research thus far has centered around the social determinants of health and health policy, and he is currently involved in research projects with Nova Scotia’s Emergency Health Services.
Dr. Daniel Dutton is an associate professor in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie University. His research is on how public policy can improve population health, dealing with issues like government spending and programs, food insecurity, and homelessness. Most of his work is quantitative, using large datasets and modeling strategies from economics and epidemiology. Prior to his Ph.D., Dan worked for a short time in the Ontario Ministry of Finance. He also owns a Saint Bernard named Odin.
