Authors: R Lindsay R T Burge D M Strauss
Publish Date: 2004/05/27
Volume: 16, Issue: 1, Pages: 78-85
Abstract
Vertebral fractures are believed to be important predictors for future vertebral and other fractures leading to at least a 4 to 5fold increase in the risk of subsequent fractures However little is known about their associated nearterm costs The purpose of this study was to quantify the subsequent fracture and cost outcomes emanating from patients with an incident vertebral fracture A probabilistic decision analysis model was developed to estimate the expected cost of all subsequent fractures We ran KaplanMeier timetoevent models on placebo patients in risedronate’s pivotal phase III clinical trial data to determine the cumulative incidence or probabilities of all fractures within one year of an incident vertebral fracture Unit costs for health care payers in the USA and Sweden for vertebral hip other and forearm/wrist fractures were multiplied by fracture probabilities to generate the expected costs of new fractures within one year of incident vertebral fractures Our analysis found that that 261 of vertebral fracture patients with a mean age of 74 years refractured within 1 year vertebral 174 hip 36 “other” 35 forearm/wrist 16 The calculated medical costs for those patients who refracture within 1 year was 5906 and €3670 for the USA and Sweden respectively while the weighted average cost across all patients refracture and nonfracture within a year of their incident fracture was 1541 USA and €958 Sweden These results suggest that therapies with proven rapid efficacy may offer important economic value to healthcare payers providers and patients
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