Abstract Details

ET is one of the most common neurological disorders, affecting an estimated 2.2% of the entire US population. Despite its high prevalence and associated morbidity and mortality, there are no published data on the medical costs associated with ET care. Hence, the economic burden of ET is currently unknown.

To estimate total cost of direct medical care among Medicare age-eligible beneficiaries with essential tremor (ET).

This is a retrospective secondary data analysis using the 5% Medicare claims data from 2016 to study age-eligible Medicare beneficiaries diagnosed with ET (diagnostic code G250). We examined encounter-level costs (amounts paid) and total annual costs of care adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, provider specialty, setting, and the most common comorbidities, using a generalized linear model. From these results, we estimated a prevalence-based population-level cost of care.

Our sample included 4,371 Medicare beneficiaries who had one or more encounters with an ET diagnosis between January 1 and December 31, 2016. Beneficiaries had an average of 0.31, 5.16, and 3.94 inpatient, hospital outpatient, and physician office encounters, respectively, over the course of the year. Office visits with neurologists, although common, only represented 59% of office encounters, with other specialists and primary care providers responsible for much of the care of ET patients (41%).  The average annual adjusted total cost of care per ET patient was $6,238.  Based on prevalence estimates, this translates into an aggregated population-level annual expenditure of $14.97 billion. In addition, we separated out the annual costs only of those encounters that had a coded ET diagnosis, and these were $835 million, and we estimated annual costs of prescription drugs for ET at $571 million.

The estimated direct medical costs among Medicare beneficiaries with an ET diagnosis aggregated to the population-level are non-trivial. These data begin to fill a gap in knowledge.