Self-rated health when population health is challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic; a longitudinal study

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and consequent lockdown measures have had a large impact on people's lives. Recent evidence suggests that self-rated health (SRH) scores remained relatively stable or increased during the pandemic.

For the current project, we examine potential changes in the variance decomposition of SRH before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands.

We analyse data from the Netherlands Twin Register to examine pre-pandemic SRH scores (N = 16,127), pandemic SRH scores (N = 17,451), and SRH difference scores (N = 7464). Additionally, we perform bivariate genetic analyses to estimate genetic and environmental variance components in pre-pandemic and pandemic SRH, and estimate the genetic correlation to assess potential gene-environment interaction.

The majority of the sample (66.7%) reported the same SRH before and during the pandemic, while 10.8% reported a decrease, and 22.5% an increase. Individuals who reported good/excellent SRH before the pandemic were most likely to report unchanged SRH during the pandemic, and individuals with bad/mediocre/reasonable SRH more often reported increased SRH. The bivariate longitudinal genetic model reveals no significant change in variance decomposition of SRH from before to during the pandemic, with a heritability estimate of 45% (CI 36%-52%). We found that the genetic correlation could be constrained to 1, and a moderate unique environmental correlation (r_E = 0.49, CI = 0.37 to 0.60).

We theorize that the increases in SRH are explained by uninfected individuals evaluating their health more positively than under normal circumstances (partly through social comparison with infected individuals), rather than actual improvements. As the same genes are expressed under different environmental exposures, these results imply no evidence for gene-environment interaction. While different environmental factors might influence SRH at the two time-points, the influence of environmental factors does not become relatively more important during the pandemic.