Changes in smoking and drinking behaviors after the incidence of chronic diseases

Abstract

Background: Individuals who engage in unhealthy behaviors tend to retain them despite knowing that such behaviors are harmful to their health. The present study examined whether the incidence of chronic diseases influences individuals’ unhealthy behaviors and whether such effects persist in the long-term.

Methods: Empirical analysis was applied to secondary data from the Korean Health Panel (KHP) 2009–2013 and a sample of 35,996 individuals was utilized. We employed a two-way fixed effect model to control for the endogeneity problem in tracing out how each individual’s smoking and drinking behavior changes over time, with the incidence of chronic diseases.

Results: The empirical results showed that the odds of quitting smoking and drinking increased by 111.8% (OR = 0.472, P < .01) and 28.7% (OR = 0.777, P < .01), respectively, when healthy persons were diagnosed with a chronic disease. Further, as the number of chronic diseases increased by one, the odds of quitting smoking and drinking increased by 50.6% (OR = 0.664, P < .01) and 15.9% (OR = 0.863, P < .01), respectively, and such effects persisted even in the long-term.

Conclusion: These findings imply that individuals change their unhealthy behaviors to healthy ones when they experience an increase in the number of chronic diseases.

Keywords:

• Chronic diseases
• smoking
• drinking
• two-way fixed effect model

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Dong-A University Research Fund.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this work was provided by Dong-A University. However, the university had no role in the study design, collection, analysis, or interpretation of the data; in writing the manuscript; or in the decision to submit the paper for publication.