The Direct Medical Cost of Essential Tremor.

Abstract

To determine the direct medical cost of illness from essential tremor (ET) from a patient perspective. Secondary data from the Optum's de-identified Clinformatics® Data Mart Database (CDM) from 2018-2019 was used to assess medical resource utilization and costs. Propensity score matching was used to match patients age 40+ with to statistically similar controls. Generalized linear models were used to estimate average, adjusted total costs of care per year, by health care setting, and provider specialty. The final sample included 41,200 patients with at least one ET claim and 36,871 matched patients. Overall, ET patients ages 40+ had about $28,217 in direct medical costs per year, which was about $1,601 more than matched comparisons (p < 0.001). This was driven by greater number of outpatient visits overall and with specialists. Extrapolating the estimates from our study and pairing them with published age-specific disease prevalence statistics for ET, we calculated an annual cost for direct medical care of ET patients ages 40+ to be about $9.4 billion. The estimated direct medical costs among adults age 40+ with an ET diagnosis aggregated to the population-level are non-trivial.