- Title
- Can the direct medical cost of chronic disease be transferred across different countries? Using cost-of-illness studies on type 2 diabetes, epilepsy and schizophrenia as examples
- Creator
- Gao, Lan; Hu, Hao; Zhao, Fei-Li; Li, Shu-Chen
- Relation
- PLoS One Vol. 11, Issue 1
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147169
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- Objectives: To systematically review cost of illness studies for schizophrenia (SC), epilepsy (EP) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T₂DM) and explore the transferability of direct medical cost across countries. Methods: A comprehensive literature search was performed to yield studies that estimated direct medical costs. A generalized linear model (GLM) with gamma distribution and log link was utilized to explore the variation in costs that accounted by the included factors. Both parametric (Random-effects model) and non-parametric (Boot-strapping) meta-analyses were performed to pool the converted raw cost data (expressed as percentage of GDP/capita of the country where the study was conducted). Results: In total, 93 articles were included (40 studies were for T₂DM, 34 studies for EP and 19 studies for SC). Significant variances were detected inter- and intra-disease classes for the direct medical costs. Multivariate analysis identified that GDP/capita (p<0.05) was a significant factor contributing to the large variance in the cost results. Bootstrapping meta-analysis generated more conservative estimations with slightly wider 95% confidence intervals (CI) than the parametric meta-analysis, yielding a mean (95%CI) of 16.43% (11.32, 21.54) for T₂DM, 36.17% (22.34, 50.00) for SC and 10.49% (7.86, 13.41) for EP. Conclusions: Converting the raw cost data into percentage of GDP/capita of individual country was demonstrated to be a feasible approach to transfer the direct medical cost across countries. The approach from our study to obtain an estimated direct cost value along with the size of specific disease population from each jurisdiction could be used for a quick check on the economic burden of particular disease for countries without such data.
- Subject
- chronic diseases; cost-of-illness; medical costs
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1322640
- Identifier
- uon:24618
- Identifier
- ISSN:1932-6203
- Rights
- Copyright: © 2016 Gao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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