Having More Than One Chronic Disease Amplifies Costs of Diseases, Study Finds

A study published in PLOS Medicine found having two or more non-communicable diseases costs more for New Zealand than the costs of the individual maladies, reports Newswise . The investigators used nationally linked health data for all New Zealanders, including 18.9 million person-years and $26.4 billion in spending. They estimated annual health costs per individual and analyzed the association of this spending to whether a person had cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, musculoskeletal, neurological, and lung/liver/kidney (LLK) diseases, or any combination thereof. Analysis determined 59 percent of publicly-funded health expenditures stemmed from non-communicable diseases, with 23.8 percent of this spending attributable to the cost of having multiple diseases above and beyond what the diseases cost separately. Heart disease and stroke accounted for 18.7 percent of the remaining expenditures, followed by musculoskeletal (16.2 percent), neurological (14.4 percent), cancer (14.1 percent), LLK disease (7.4 percent), and diabetes (5.5 percent). Overall, spending was highest in the year of diagnosis and the year of death. "There is a surprising lack of disease-attributed costing studies involving multiple diseases at once," the researchers note. "Governments and health systems managers and funders can improve planning and prioritization knowing where the money goes."