The Great Recession from 2007 to 2009 not only claimed millions of jobs and houses, it took a toll on our health, too, according to a new study published in PNAS this week.

After the financial crisis, researchers studying a cohort of nearly 4,600 middle-aged and older adults found significant boosts in blood pressure and blood glucose levels—both contributors to health problems such as heart disease. Because the researchers had years’ worth of baseline health data on the group, they could determine that the increases were well beyond what was expected for the group based on aging and progression of preexisting health conditions alone. However, some of the increases—but not all—could be explained by some participants who stopped taking or decreased their blood pressure and diabetes medication after the recession. This appeared to be another harmful side-effect of the economic downturn.

Overall, the participants who appeared to take the hardest knocks to their health were those who were already taking medications before the recession and had the most to lose: middle-aged adults in the workforce who may fear job loss and older, more highly educated adults who owned their homes and were most likely to have invested in the stock market.

The authors, led by Teresa Seeman of University of California, Los Angeles, concluded:

The findings themselves underscore the fact that economic upheavals such as the GR [Great Recession] not only result in deleterious economic consequences that impact some population subgroups more than others but that those same population subgroups shoulder more deleterious health impacts as well.

While the conclusion may not seem surprising, the research on the health consequences of economic downturns has actually been mixed. Some studies have found improvements in mortality rates and health after economic crises, while others have found the opposite.

Turn for the worse

For the new study, Seeman and colleagues turned to longitudinal health data collected from people aged 50 to 90 (ages in 2008) in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) study. The study was set up to look at the development of heart disease, but researchers found it provided a perfect timeline for studying the effects of the Great Recession. Researchers had collected health data in four waves between 2000 and 2007, before the recession hit. They then collected a fifth wave between 2010 and 2012, after the recession. The researchers had enough pre-recession data to plot out expected health progression and thus see if that progression was thrown off after the recession.

It was, the researchers found. For people younger than 65 and taking medication before the recession, systolic blood pressure increased by an average of 12.65mmHg beyond what was predicted based on pre-recession health data. (Systolic blood pressure is the first number on a blood pressure reading that indicates pressure in your blood vessels when your heart beats, as opposed to rests, indicated by the second number.) The same group also saw their blood glucose levels increase nearly 11 percent beyond what was expected.

The researchers also noted that many stopped taking their medications or reduced the intensity of their treatments after the recession. For instance, about 17 percent of those 65 or older stopped taking blood pressure medication altogether, and about 13 percent stopped taking medication for diabetes.

Further looks at age, education, and homeownership found that those with the largest changes were in the younger group, likely in the workforce and possibly affected by layoffs, and the older, highly educated who owned their homes and likely had investment income.

The study has limitations, of course, including that it didn’t look at different demographic factors, such as race. It also didn’t include data on employment or foreclosure, so it only provides correlations of health and generalized stresses of economic downturns.

Lastly, it only had one wave of data collected from after the recession. Thus, researchers can’t tell if the health effects identified are permanent or if they’ll lead to more serious health issues, like heart attacks and death. This is what Seeman and her team are working on next, expecting to analyze more data that was collected between 2016 and 2017 soon.

PNAS, 2018. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1710502115 (About DOIs).