Diabetics Spend $85,000 To Treat the Disease

What would you do with $85,000? Pay off your mortgage? Buy a new car? Go on vacation? Invest?
For diabetics, that is how much they will spend during their lifetime treating their disease. It is an astronomical amount to think of spending on any one thing, let alone a disease.
A new study, aimed at understanding the financial cost and return on delaying and preventing diabetes came up with that numerical figure. The study, conducted by researchers at the CDC and Research Triangle International, NC, found that the earlier diabetes is diagnosed, the greater the lifetime costs. As well, researchers found that women spend more in treating the disease than men, but the lifetime costs for women are higher than they are for men.
"Anything that can prevent or delay the onset of type 2 diabetes could lead to a sizeable reduction in healthcare costs in the future," researchers said.
The goal of the study was to understand the financial return of preventing and delaying diabetes and to find out about the long term financial impact of new diabetes cases.
Xiaohui Zhuo, Ph.D. of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and lead author of the study, said, "This has become increasingly important given the rapid increase of the number of the incident cases in the US and worldwide."
Researchers designed a simulation model that was used to determine the costs of treating type 2 diabetes and its complications over a lifetime in those who were recently diagnosed.
Based on the model, researchers found that a man diagnosed with diabetes between the ages of 25 and 44 will spend about $124,700 treating the disease over his lifetime. A woman who is diagnosed with diabetes in the same age range will spend $130,800 over her life. When diabetes is diagnosed later in life, the costs decrease.
Of those costs, roughly 53 percent is spent on treating complications that occur because of diabetes and 47 percent is spent on complications that occur because of damage to large blood vessels that can lead to fatal heart disease and strokes.
"This is a different approach to a calculation of the costs of diabetes," said Robert E. Ratner, M.D., chief scientific and medical officer at the American Diabetes Association. "A better way of doing it is to note that in 2012, in the US, we actually had $176 billion in direct medical costs treating people with diabetes," he said. "This is up 40 percent in 5 years."
Medications, visits to doctors, and testing supplies fall under direct medical costs, and also includes treating complications like stroke, amputation, and eye damage.
Reference: Science World Report
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