Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, United States.
J Health Econ. 2012 Sep;31(5):705-18. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2012.05.002. Epub 2012 Jun 1.
We examine whether exposure to direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) for antidepressant drugs affects individual use of these medications among those suffering from depression. Prior studies have almost exclusively relied on making connections between national or market-level advertising volume/expenditures and national or individual-level usage of medications. This is the first study to: estimate the impact of individual-level exposure to DTCA on individual-level use of antidepressants; estimate the impact of individual-level exposure to television DTCA on individual-level use in any drug class; consider the relative and interactive impact of DTCA in two different media in any drug class; and, consider the heterogeneity of impact among different populations in an econometric framework in the antidepressant market. There are also important limitations to note. Unlike prior market level studies that use monthly data, we are limited to aggregated annual data. Our measures of potential advertising exposure are constructed assuming that media consumption patterns are stable during the year. We are also not able to study the impact of advertising on use of antidepressants for conditions other than depression, such as anxiety disorders. We find that: DTCA impacts antidepressant use in a statistically and economically significant manner; that these effects are present in both television and magazine advertising exposure but do not appear to have interactive effects; are stronger for women than for men in the magazine medium, but are about equally strong for men and women in the TV medium; and, are somewhat stronger for groups suffering from more severe forms of depression. The overall size of the effect is a 6-10 percentage point increase in antidepressant use from being exposed to television advertising; the corresponding magazine effects are between 3 and 4 percentage points.
我们研究了直接面向消费者的抗抑郁药广告（DTCA）的暴露是否会影响抑郁症患者对这些药物的个人使用。先前的研究几乎完全依赖于将国家或市场层面的广告量/支出与国家或个人层面的药物使用情况联系起来。这是第一项研究：估计个人层面接触 DTCA 对个人使用抗抑郁药的影响；估计个人层面接触电视 DTCA 对任何药物类别的个人使用的影响；考虑任何药物类别中两种不同媒体的 DTCA 的相对和交互影响；并在抗抑郁药市场的计量经济学框架中考虑不同人群影响的异质性。还有一些需要注意的重要限制。与使用月度数据的先前市场水平研究不同，我们仅限于汇总的年度数据。我们对潜在广告暴露的衡量是基于假设媒体消费模式在一年中是稳定的。我们也无法研究广告对除抑郁症以外的其他疾病（如焦虑症）使用抗抑郁药的影响。我们发现：DTCA 以统计上和经济上显著的方式影响抗抑郁药的使用；这些影响存在于电视和杂志广告暴露中，但似乎没有交互效应；在杂志媒体中，女性的影响大于男性，但在电视媒体中，男性和女性的影响大致相同；对于患有更严重抑郁症形式的群体，影响稍强。这种影响的总体规模是，与接触电视广告相比，抗抑郁药的使用增加了 6-10 个百分点；相应的杂志效果在 3 到 4 个百分点之间。
