A new analysis has found that, for some types of medications, income is a pretty strong predictor of how often someone is picking up a drug to treat an ailment.
The analysis, by GoodRx, a company that tracks prescription drug prices, looked at how often residents of different neighborhoods filled prescriptions for different categories of drugs.
Patients in wealthier neighborhoods were much more likely to pick up prescriptions for lifestyle problems: erectile dysfunction, baldness, anti-wrinkle Botox injections and an eye medicine that thickens eyelashes. This may be unsurprising.
But the analysis also showed that richer patients were more likely to buy drugs for certain serious conditions, including mental health disorders. This was the case even though the analysis showed that income doesn’t track with overall prescription use.
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These prescriptions for serious conditions were filled disproportionately in rich neighborhoods despite evidence that the rich tend to be in overall better health. In fact, people in rich neighborhoods filled fewer prescriptions than people in middle-class neighborhoods. The blend of data suggests that, while prescriptions and income don’t track well overall, there are points where they do.
Several experts in the demographics of drug use said all those factors might explain the higher usage of medications for mental health problems among wealthier people. Some mental health problems are more prevalent among Americans with lower incomes, evidence shows. But longtime holes in the health care system mean that richer patients are more likely to have private insurance or extra money to pay for psychiatric care that is not covered by insurance.
Some drugs seem to be taken about equally regardless of income. The use of antibiotics appears to be roughly the same for middle-class and rich Americans.
The GoodRx data looked at a sample of 53 million retail pharmacy purchases in 39 large metropolitan areas over a year ending in October 2018, then divided them according to the income characteristics of the people who lived in the census tract where the pharmacy was located.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.