It is a pleasant idea that simple “nudges” will have an effect on behavior. If so, the truth appears to be — to a point. In fact, all behavior is processed thru the brain and the brain is determined 200% by genetics — most of which are inherited and determined at birth.
Likely, this gene-policy dynamic applies to marketing and financial services.
Take Aways –
- The study found biological evidence that may help explain why some people respond to anti-smoking inducements, such as higher taxes and the expansion of clean-air laws, and why others do not.
- “We found that for people who are genetically predisposed to tobacco addiction, higher cigarette taxes were not enough to dissuade them from smoking,”
New research from the Yale School of Public Health suggests that individuals’ genetics play an important role in whether they respond to tobacco-control policies. The study appears online in the journal PLOS ONE.
Smoking dropped sharply after the Surgeon General’s landmark report on the dangers of tobacco was published in 1964, but rates have plateaued during the past two decades despite increasingly stringent measures to persuade people to quit. The study found biological evidence that may help explain why some people respond to anti-smoking inducements, such as higher taxes and the expansion of clean-air laws, and why others do not.
“We found that for people who are genetically predisposed to tobacco addiction, higher cigarette taxes were not enough to dissuade them from smoking,”…examined the interplay between state-level tobacco taxation and a nicotinic receptor gene in a cross-section of U.S. adults.
The “gene-policy interaction” study, the first of its kind, found that:
- variations in the nicotine receptor were linked to the influence of higher taxes on multiple measures of tobacco use.
- Individuals with a specific genetic variant decreased their tobacco use by nearly 30 percent when facing high tobacco taxes, while individuals with an alternative genetic variant had no response.
“This study is an important first step in considering how to further reduce adult smoking rates,” said Fletcher. “We need to understand why existing policies do not work for everyone so that we can develop more effective approaches.”
The gap in the effectiveness of tobacco-control policies remains poorly understood. The findings suggest that strategies that do not rely on financial or social consequences may be needed to persuade a still-significant segment of the population to quit, notes Fletcher.
Tobacco use remains the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, and is responsible for more than 400,000 deaths each year, according to the study. Tobacco taxation, meanwhile, has been credited with helping to reduce use by more than 50 percent since the Surgeon General’s report.
Why Have Tobacco Control Policies Stalled? Using Genetic Moderation to Examine Policy Impacts by Jason M. Fletcher* jason.fletcher@yale.edu
Background – Research has shown that tobacco control policies have helped produce the dramatic decline in use over the decades following the 1964 surgeon general’s report. However, prevalence rates have stagnated during the past two decades in the US, even with large tobacco taxes and expansions of clean air laws. The observed differences in tobacco control policy effectiveness and why policies do not help all smokers are largely unexplained.
Conclusions
This study provides novel evidence of “gene-policy” interaction and suggests a genetic mechanism for the large differences in response to tobacco policies. The inability for these policies to reduce use for individuals with specific genotypes suggests alternative methods may be needed to further reduce use.
Introduction
- Tobacco use is among the most important causes of morbidity and the leading preventable cause of death in the US, with over 400,000 deaths per year
- This number accounts for more deaths than AIDS, alcohol use, cocaine use, heroin use, homicides, suicides, motor vehicle crashes, and fires combine.
- Although studies suggest that as much as 70% of the variance in nicotine dependence and other tobacco use phenotypes could be due to genetic factors, the principal policies to reduce tobacco use have been broad-based and non-targeted.
Following economic theory, governments have sought to increase the price of tobacco in order to reduce consumption. Indeed, one of the most successful policies to reduce tobacco use has been tobacco taxation, helping to reduce use by over 50% since the mid 1960 s, which has been suggested as one of the most successful public health interventions in the 20th century….
However, these large changes in policy have not produced commensurate reductions in tobacco use, which has been largely unchanged for the past 20 years, varying between 20% and 25%. Indeed, there has been important heterogeneity of the impacts of the policy between broadly defined socio-demographic groups, such as by age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status. There is also emerging evidence that tax responses may be related to self control and other characteristics. … Specifically, the large differentials in responses have not been fully examined or elucidated in order to predict individual differences and discover why taxation does not seem to work for everyone.
Because of the prominence of genetic factors in determining tobacco use phenotypes, a remaining question is whether these genetic factors are an important source of the success (and failure) of these broad-based tobacco control policies. In order to examine genetic heterogeneity in the response to policy, this paper targets a specific polymorphism in the alpha-6 subunit found in nicotinic acetylcholine receptors found primarily in the brain and expressed on dopamine-releasing neurons in the midbrain.
This variant was selected because it directly mediates the rewarding aspects of nicotine consumption, and does not play a primary role in mediating the effects of other drugs of abuse. The hypothesis of interest in this study is whether this polymorphism interacts with a specific environmental exposure–state-level tobacco tax rates–in determining tobacco use. This interaction would produce novel evidence of potential gene-policy interaction (GxP) and increase understanding of why tobacco taxation produces heterogeneous responses.
Gene-Environment Interaction Results
Like previous literature, the G/G genotype is protective, as are high tobacco taxes; the interaction between CHRNA6 and tax rates showed that the effect of the tax is only present for individuals with the protective (G/G) genotype and absent in other individuals…. these results are robust to the addition of demographic covariates…Results showing that the genotype is unrelated to gender, age, education, income, and marital status, among other variables, are available from the author.
Discussion
This study showed that the impact of tobacco taxation on tobacco use is moderated by individual genotype. Indeed,
- only individuals with the protective G/G genotype were found to respond to state level tobacco taxation rates
- Unlike previous reports of G X E, where individuals might have a heritable tendency to have an elevated likelihood of being exposed to a particular “environment”the current application has minimal issues with so-called gene-environment correlation because the CHRNA6 genotype is unrelated to state-tax policy
- Relative to prior studies, this allows greater certainty in establishing causal interactive effects between genotype and exposure
- Additionally, the use of a policy instrument to examine modulation of genetic effects is novel and more easily subject to intervention than alternative measures of environmental exposure (e.g. divorce, child maltreatment), even if the policy cannot be targeted to certain genotypes.
If replicated, the findings in this study are suggestive of a key and under-examined genetic role in determining response to important health policies. The results are stark in that a single SNP is used to completely segment the population into the approximately 50% of adults who are likely to respond to tobacco taxation and the 50% who are unresponsive. This is an important first step in future health policy efforts to further reduce adult smoking rates. Additionally, this study has begun a new examination of potential gene X policy (G X P) interactions that may have broad scope in learning why some policies are effective and other are not and also deepen our understanding of the genetic response to broad-based policy interventions.
Your Brain: Your Business 
Leave a comment