This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Social costs of AMD high, with wide variation across countries, study shows
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
VIENNA — A cross-sectional, observational study of the social costs of age-related macular degeneration found a wide variation of expenses across the five countries surveyed. The results reflect the differences in national health care systems and neovascular AMD treatment patterns, according to the study authors.
Gisele Soubrane, MD, and colleagues analyzed data obtained from physicians' records and telephone interviews with AMD patients in France, Germany, Spain the United Kingdom and Canada. These interviews focused on medical resource utilization, assistance with daily living and social benefits. Annual costs included direct vision-related and non-vision-related medical expenditures as well as direct non-medical-related expenditures.
The study included 401 AMD patients aged 76 to 80 years. The results showed that the resources utilized by neovascular AMD patients are "substantial, resulting in significant costs to societies," according to the study, presented in a poster here at the joint meeting of the European Society of Ophthalmology and American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Germany had the highest annual societal cost per patient — $14,321 — followed by Canada, with an annual per patient cost of $9,667, and France, which had an annual cost of $8,457.
For Spain and the U.K., the cost per patient was less than half that in Germany, with Spain spending $6,597 and the U.K. spending $6,099, according to the study.
Estimated social costs for all bilateral neovascular AMD cases ranged from $772 million to $3.772 billion, the authors noted.
Previous research into the economic impact of neovascular AMD generally focused on direct medical costs and rarely evaluated the economic burden of progressing blindness on the everyday lives of AMD patients, they added.