Comprehensive estimation model for the health economic impact of the residential environment

Abstract

The residential environment impacts the health and economic status of residents, for example, via medical costs and income loss from absenteeism. However, previous studies often do not consider assessments of the thermal, acoustic, light, hygiene, safety, and security environments in the residence simultaneously, and the age and sex of the residents. Therefore, this study proposed improvements to a previous method and validated the improved method for estimating health economic impact that considers the residential environment conditions and residents comprehensively. The individual scale validation demonstrated that the relationship between the comprehensive assessment of the residential environment and the risk of 10 types of diseases (diabetes mellitus, cerebrovascular diseases, disorders of conjunctiva, hypertensive diseases, heart diseases, upper respiratory tract disorders, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, dermatitis and eczema, and inflammatory arthropathies) differs by age and sex. When these disease-related economic losses were aggregated, older males were estimated to suffer the greatest losses from their residential environment in Japan. The economic impact of residential environment by resident attributes was aggregated according to the population distribution as an advanced application of the estimation model. The total economic loss from substandard residential environments across Japan was estimated to be about JPY 725 billion per year. These results should incentivize residents and policymakers to improve the residential environment. The estimation-model development process is universally applicable and may lead to the creation of optimized benchmarks in every region of the world, thereby contributing to improvements in the residential environment aimed at reducing health risks and economic losses.