Folic acid advisories: a public health challenge?
Neural tube defects are neurological conditions affecting one in 1000 fetuses in France each year. If a fetus is affected, there is a 90% chance that the pregnancy will be terminated. Increasing folic acid intake to 400μg per day 2months before and 2months after conception reduces prevalence rates by at least 40%. In 2005, France introduced a social marketing campaign seeking to increase the intake of folic acid by to-be-pregnant and pregnant women through information provision. This paper sets up a quasi-experimental setting to measure the impact of the French social marketing campaign on availability and preferences for folic acid. I combine detailed scanner data on grocery purchases with a dataset on macronutrients and micronutrients. The identification strategy exploits the variation in the usefulness of folic acid information between households: households that are pregnant or want to conceive a child use it, while those that are not pregnant do not. Results suggest evidence of a positive impact of the information campaign on folic acid household availability and preferences. A value per statistical neural tube defects case is found to be of at least 12 million. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Hospinnomics, Paris School of Economics and Assistance Publique - Hopitaux de Paris, Paris, France.
Daniel
0000-0002-2044-6718
D
Herrera-Araujo
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D005492:Folic Acid / Q000008:administration & dosage*; D005602:France / Q000453:epidemiology; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination / Q000379:methods*; D040541:Marketing / Q000379:methods; D009436:Neural Tube Defects / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000517:prevention & control; D011247:Pregnancy; D011295:Prenatal Care; D011634:Public Health
D005492:Folic Acid
folic acid; fuzzy difference-difference; nutritional information campaigns; public health; structural demand estimation