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‘Cost of illness’ study of AMD proposed
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Cost-of-illness studies, which have been done in many fields of medicine, are relatively rare in ophthalmology. An Australian team asserts that a study measuring the economic impact of age-related macular degeneration is “bothe feasible and necessary for informed health care decision-making.”
In a “Perspectives” piece in in the December issue of Clinical & Experimental Ophthalmology, Paul Mitchell, MD, and colleagues with the University of Sydney (Australia) observe that AMD is the leading cause of blindness in elderly Australians. Photodynamic therapy, they say, is “a relatively expensive and possibly cost-effective innovation” that can benefit some patients. Antioxidant therapy may also help deter the progression of the disease from early to late stages.
The authors suggest that a cost-of-illness study would help describe the current burden of the disease, predict the changes in the burden of the disease over time and evaluate the efficacy of various interventions.