The Economics of Undiagnosed Diabetes

Approximately 6.3 million adults – or one-fourth of the people in the U.S. with diabetes mellitus – are unaware they have the disease, and this undiagnosed population accounts for an estimated $18 billion in health care costs each year.

Yiduo Zhang, PhD, from the Lewin Group (Falls Church, VA), and colleagues from Ingenix Pharmainformatics (Cary, NC), and Ingenix Research (Basking Ridge, NJ), studied the health care use patterns of a group of people for the 2-year period leading up to a diagnosis of diabetes. They used these findings as the basis for economic estimates they present in the report, “The Economic Costs of Undiagnosed Diabetes.”

Diabetes cost the U.S. economy about $174 billion in 2007 in medical expenses and lost productivity, but that figure does not take into account the national economic costs associated with undiagnosed diabetes, which could raise the estimate to more than $192 billion. Yearly health care needs for individuals with undiagnosed diabetes tend to be higher than for persons who do not have diabetes. The health care costs associated with diabetes begin to increase at least 8 years before diagnosis and grow at a faster rate shortly before and after diagnosis.

“Diabetes is one of the most devastating chronic diseases and costs the nation billions of dollars. Building an evidence base as to what works and what doesn’t is going to be critical,” says Population Health Management Editor-in-Chief David B. Nash, MD, MBA, Dean, and Dr. Raymond C. and Doris N. Grandon Professor of Health Policy, Jefferson School of Population Health, Philadelphia, PA.
Zhang and colleagues studied the healthcare use patterns of nearly 30,000 people for the 2-year period leading up to a diagnosis of diabetes and compared them with medical claims of people never diagnosed with diabetes.
They estimated that undiagnosed diabetes in 2007 cost an additional $2,864 per person, or a total of $18 billion per year.
Complications often present in people with newly diagnosed diabetes include retina damage, nerve pain and heart disease. They said programs aimed at earlier detection and treatment could help reduce these costs.

Population Health Management, May 2009