Health Cost

healthcosts

Medical Expenditures

Diabetes imposes a substantial burden on society in the form of higher medical costs, lost productivity, premature mortality, and intangible costs in the form of reduced quality of life.

The total estimated cost in United States of diagnosed diabetes in 2017 is $327 billion, including $237  billion in direct medical costs and $90 billion in reduced productivity. After adjusting for inflation, economic costs of diabetes increased by 26% from 2012 to 2017 due to the increased prevalence of diabetes and the increased cost per person with diabetes. The growth in diabetes prevalence and medical costs is primarily among the population aged 65 years and older, contributing to a growing economic cost to the US Medicare program (American Diabetes Association, Diabetes Care 2018;41:917–928).

It is predicted worldwide that about 600 million will suffer from diabetes at year 2040. Diabetes may cause damages to several organs in the body. This create the need for several types of treatments. The most efficient will of course be to control glucose levels over time in blood. Thus this far it has not been proven to be an easy task to do and therefor targeting various organs will be needed. Pharmaceutical treatment may be expensive and will most likely be an extreme economic challenge for the national healthcare systems.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) affecting eyes is a clear example that is causing visual impairment in the working-age population. Of an estimated 468 million people with diabetes worldwide more than 90 million diabetics are struggling with progressing DR. One third of these has a severe vision-threatening DR.

Unfortunate there is a clear issue, even in wealthy countries with established general healthcare as Sweden, that the publically financed healthcare system can be unable to treat large groups of patients if pharmaceutical treatments are too expensive. Even thou effective drugs are being developed.

The demand for inexpensive pharmaceuticals for treatment of large patient populations will be desirable, to manage the DR challenge.

To meat up with this demand – Glucox Biotech AB have a possible inexpensive easy to administer drug treatment to prevent diabetics in patients with risk of developing DR.