Diabetes Epidemic Costs Lives and Billions of Dollars

A new study reports that concomitant to diabetes rapidly becoming one of the world's most common diseases, its financial toll is also mounting--to over US$218 billion a year in the United States alone.

Researchers at the Lewin Group (Falls Church, VA, USA) based their calculations on figures derived from databases detailing treatment costs of people with commercial insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, U.S. federal public health surveys, and other sources. The sums include direct medical care costs--from insulin and medication to surgical amputations and hospitalizations--and indirect costs such as lost productivity, disability, and early retirement. A breakdown of the figures estimate the costs to society for people known to have Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes at $174.4 billion combined, diabetics as yet undiagnosed ($18 billion), women who develop gestational diabetes temporarily during pregnancy ($636 million) and sufferers from an increasingly common condition called prediabetes ($25 billion).

Among people known to have diabetes, the new study estimated $10.5 billion in medical costs and $4.4 billion in indirect costs, or a total of $14.9 billion, for people with Type 1 diabetes (or 6% of the 17.5 million Americans diagnosed with diabetes). The study estimated a further $105.7 billion in medical costs and $53.8 billion in indirect costs, totaling $159.5 billion, for people with Type 2 diabetes. The study was financed by Novo Nordisk (Bagsværd, Denmark) in association with the American Diabetes Association (Alexandria, VA, USA).

"Diabetes has not seen a decline or even a plateauing, and the death rate from diabetes continues to rise," said Dana Haza, senior director of the U.S. National Changing Diabetes Program, which includes medical partners such as the American Academy of Family Physicians and American Diabetes Association. "The numbers just keep going higher and higher, and what we want to say is, It's time for government and businesses to focus on it."

"This study gives a very persuasive argument to employers to invest in a culture of health in their workforce," said Andrew Webber, president and CEO of the U.S. National Business Coalition on Health (Washington, DC, USA), a group that includes 61 business coalitions with about 7,000 employers and 35 million employees and dependents.

Related Links:
Lewin Group
Novo Nordisk
American Diabetes Association
U.S. National Business Coalition on Health