Diabetes and the Life-Course: Evidence from Panel Data and Electronic Health Records

Incidence of type 2 diabetes is increasing at ages when education, work, family, and financial transitions are taking place, yet we lack robust evidence of whether earlier treatment changes life-course outcomes and over which time span this takes place. This paper uses the medical cutoff for diabetes diagnosis (HbA1c of 6.5 percent) as a natural experiment to study the effects of diabetes treatment using electronic health records (EHR) and panel data. This paper has three main findings. First, using EHR data, we find that there is a sharp increase in the probability of both diagnosis of diabetes and prescription when the HbA1c equals 6.5 percent. Second, we find that treating diabetes reduces HbA1c levels, weight, BMI, and blood pressure and increases the amount of care received, proxied by the number of HbA1c tests. Both the diagnosis and a prescription are independently able to produce positive changes in metabolic health, although a prescription is more effective in this regard. Third, we conclude that treating diabetes does not have a significant effect on life-course outcomes for a cohort of young Americans aged 24-32, although it does result in a reduction in HbA1c levels that are seen even eight years after the intervention. Taken together, these findings suggest that receiving a diagnosis and prescription are both effective treatments for diabetes, but they do not translate to significant alterations in the lives of young adults in the medium-term.