Blog Post

The Economic Burden of Parkinson’s Disease: Chart of the Day

Medicare Costs Rise with Advanced Disease

By:
  • Janet Weiner, PhD, MPH
Figure 1. Mean costs for any Parkinson’s disease (PD)-related claims and proportions of patients with advanced and mild/moderate PD, by patient decile. Source: Burden of Parkinson’s Disease by Severity: Health Care Costs in the U.S. Medicare Population, Movement Disorders, 2020.

A new study in the journal Movement Disorders calculates the considerable health care costs of Parkinson’s disease (PD), a progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Using Medicare fee-for-service claims, LDI Senior Fellows Nabila Dahodwala, Pengxiang Li, Jalpa Doshi, and colleagues quantify this economic burden in one calendar year, and measure the incremental costs of advanced disease.  As the above chart shows, these one-year costs vary substantially, from $483 to $48,145 (2018 dollars).  After controlling for sociodemographic, clinical, and treatment characteristics, patients with advanced PD group had about $6,000 more in claims costs than those with mild/moderate PD.  These data are important for cost-effectiveness studies of PD therapies, and underscore the need to invest in efforts to delay PD disease progression and to improve treatments for advanced PD.

The study, Burden of Parkinson’s Disease by Severity: Health Care Costs in the U.S. Medicare Population, was published in Movement Disorders on October 8, 2020. Authors include Nabila Dahodwala, Pengxiang Li, Jordan Jahnke, Vrushabh P. Ladage, Amy R. Pettit, Prasanna L. Kandukuri, Yanjun Bao, Jorge Zamudio, Yash J. Jalundhwala, and Jalpa A. Doshi.

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