The Direct Medical Cost of Essential Tremor

Objectives

The aim of the study was to determine the direct medical cost of illness from essential tremor (ET) from a patient perspective.

Methods

Secondary data from the Optum’s de-identified Clinformatics® Data Mart Database from 2018-2019 were used to assess medical resource utilization and costs. Propensity score matching was used to match patients aged 40+ to statistically similar controls. Generalized linear models were used to estimate average, adjusted total costs of care per year, by healthcare setting, and provider specialty.

Results

The final sample included 41,200 patients with at least one ET claim and 36,871 matched patients. Overall, ET patients aged 40+ had about USD 28,217 in direct medical costs per year, which was about USD 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 aged 40+ to be about USD 9.4 billion.

Conclusion

The estimated direct medical costs among adults aged 40+ with an ET diagnosis aggregated to the population level are nontrivial.