Department of Business and Economics, Centre of Health Economics Research, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230, Odense M, Denmark,
Eur J Health Econ. 2015 Jul;16(6):603-12. doi: 10.1007/s10198-014-0612-6. Epub 2014 Jun 8.
Oral clefts are among the most common birth defects affecting thousands of newborns each year, but little is known about their potential long-term consequences. In this paper, we explore the impact of oral clefts on health care utilization over most of the lifespan. To account for time-invariant unobservable parental characteristics, we compare affected individuals with their own unaffected siblings. The analysis is based on unique data comprising the entire cohort of individuals born with oral clefts in Denmark tracked until adulthood in administrative register data. We find that children with oral clefts use more health services than their unaffected siblings. Additional results show that the effects are driven primarily by congenital malformation-related hospitalizations and intake of anti-infectives. Although the absolute differences in most health care utilization diminish over time, affected individuals have slightly higher utilization of some health care services in adulthood (particularly for diseases of the nervous and respiratory system). These results have important implications for affected individuals, their families, and their health professionals.
口腔裂是最常见的出生缺陷之一，每年影响着数千名新生儿，但人们对其潜在的长期后果知之甚少。在本文中，我们探讨了口腔裂对大多数生命周期内医疗保健利用的影响。为了解释不可观测的、与时间无关的父母特征，我们将受影响的个体与他们自己未受影响的兄弟姐妹进行了比较。该分析基于包含丹麦所有口腔裂出生者的独特数据，这些个体在行政登记数据中被跟踪到成年。我们发现，口腔裂患儿比未受影响的兄弟姐妹使用更多的医疗服务。其他结果表明，这些影响主要是由与先天畸形相关的住院治疗和抗感染药物的摄入所驱动的。尽管大多数医疗保健利用的绝对差异随时间逐渐缩小，但在成年期，受影响的个体对某些医疗服务的利用率略高（特别是对神经系统和呼吸系统疾病）。这些结果对受影响的个体、他们的家庭和他们的医疗保健专业人员都具有重要意义。
