Cost of diabetes treatment escalating in US
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More expensive medications and an increasing number of patients is driving up the cost of treating type 2 diabetes in the US, researchers reported Monday.
“Although increasing costs of therapy are partly attributable to more patients with diabetes and more medications per patient, the greatest contributor to increasing costs is the substantially greater use of newer, more costly medications,” Dr. G. Caleb Alexander, at The University of Chicago, and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
They found, based on an analysis of information from US databases, that the number of patient visits for diabetes rose from 25 million in 1994 to 36 million in 2007 and the average number of diabetes medications per patient rose from 1.14 to 1.63.
Among visits in which any treatment was given, the number in which only one drug was prescribed decreased from 82 percent to 47 percent. Insulin use decreased from 38 percent in 1994 to a low of 25 percent in 2000, and then increased again to 28 percent.
The types of medications prescribed also shifted. The use of older and cheaper “sulfonylurea” drugs decreased from 67 percent to 34 percent of treatment visits, while use of newer more costly drugs such as “glitazones” increased substantially.
Alexander and colleagues say the increasing use of newer drugs—along with other new treatments, including new forms of insulin and other new classes of drugs—accounted for increases in average cost per prescription (from $56 in 2001 to $76 in 2007) and in overall medication expenditures for those with diabetes (from $6.7 billion in 2001 to $12.5 billion in 2007).
Studies are needed, the investigators conclude, to see whether increased treatment costs are balanced by improved diabetes outcomes.
SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, October 27, 2008.
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