Do Health Check-Ups for Seniors Improve Diagnosis and Management of Hypertension and Diabetes in China?

Zhiyong Huang and Fabrice Kämpfen

No 202507, Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin

Abstract: We estimate effects of a health check-up on non-communicable disease (NCD) diagnosis and management among Chinese adults aged 50 and older. Using five waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) spanning a period of 9 years and a fixed-effect instrumental variable (IV) framework, we exploit a policy that provided free health check-ups for those 65 and above as an IV for health check-ups to address the endogeneity between health check-ups and health characteristics. We estimate that a check-up increases the probability of diabetes diagnosis by 8.3 percentage points (p=0.042), particularly among females in rural areas (13.3 percentage points, p=0.063). However, there was no significant effect on hypertension diagnosis. Despite improving diabetes detection, check-ups do not significantly increase diabetes treatment, disease control, or provider recommendations. Similarly, while they increase health behavior recommendations for hypertension management –possibly because the policy helped integrate previously diagnosed individuals into formal care– this does not translate into improved hypertension control. These findings highlight the importance of health checkups in improving diagnosis for certain conditions but reveal critical gaps in follow-up care and disease management.

Keywords: Health checkup; Hypertension; Diabetes; Diagnosis; China; Older adults (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C26 I12 I18 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2025-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10197/31864 First version, 2025 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 405 Not Allowed (http://hdl.handle.net/10197/31864 [302 Found]--> https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/handle/10197/31864)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucn:wpaper:202507

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by UCD School of Economics ().