KatCarney

HEALTHCARE-RELATED ECONOMIC BURDEN OF THE POLYCYSTIC OVARY SYNDROME (PCOS) DURING THE REPRODUCTIVE LIFESPAN.

Azziz R, Marin C, Hoq L, Badamgarav E, Song P.

Dept. of Ob/Gyn, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA; Dept of Ob/Gyn, The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; Dept of Medicine, The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; Cerner Health Insights, Beverly Hills, CA.

Context: The polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrine abnormality of reproductive-aged women today, affecting approximately 6.6% of unselected reproductive-aged women ( approximately 4 million women in the US) (1990 NIH criteria), and potentially represents a significant financial burden to our health care.

Objective: To define, using current definitions and prevalence or incidence data, the minimal economic burden that PCOS in reproductive-aged women represents for the US.

Design: Literature review Setting: Tertiary care center Patients or Other

Participants: None

Intervention(s): We performed a systematic review of the published medical literature to identify studies evaluating epidemiology of reproductive-age PCOS and its clinical consequences and costs. We tied general societal cost data for the different health consequences to reproductive-age PCOS costs, using prevalence data.

Main Outcome Measure(s): Total health-care-related economic costs.

Results: We estimated the mean annual cost of the initial evaluation to be $93 million (2.1% of total costs), that of hormonally treating menstrual dysfunction/abnormal uterine bleeding to be $1.35 billion (31.0% of total), that of providing infertility care to be $533 million (12.2% of total), that of PCOS-associated diabetes to be $1.77 billion (40.5% of total), and that of treating hirsutism to be $622 million (14.2% of total).

Conclusions: The total cost of evaluating and providing care to reproductive-aged PCOS women in the US is $4.36 billion. As the cost of the diagnostic evaluation accounted for a relatively minor part of the total costs (approximately 2%), more widespread and liberal screening for the disorder appears be a cost-effective strategy, leading to earlier diagnosis and intervention and possibly the amelioration and prevention of serious sequelae.

J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2005 Jun 8
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15944216&query_hl=7

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