What Is Your Pain In Lower Back Costing You Per Year?
|An interesting study from Germany shows how gender, age, education and marital status affects the costs involved with back pain. An average cost of $1,322 per patient per year was caused by back pain. Makes you think about what your pain in lower back is costing you.
Age, pay, marriage: A pain in the back?
Agencies
Monday, September 08, 2008 22:55 IST
BERLIN: It is well-known that back pain belongs to the most frequent health problems in the industrial nations. It is also the cause of increasing costs for health insurance schemes and the economy. In the period of just one year, 70% of adult Germans suffered from back pain.
Together with scientists from the Institute for Community Medicine of the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität in Greifswald, Christina Wenig and Bernd Schweikert of the Institute of Health Economics and Health Care Management of the German Research Center for Environmental Health have now scrutinised socio-demographic variables of patients as potential cost-influencing parameters.
For the first time, in a German so-called “Bottom-up study”, scientists examined how gender, age, education and marital status might possibly affect the costs caused by back pain. The advantage of this method is that the most important components of costs could be identified, and also variability and distribution of costs could be explained.
9,267 Germans were included in asurvey by the German Back Pain Research Network (GBPRN); the result was derived from population aged 18 to 75.
The team found out that on average a cost of $1,322 per patient per annum was caused by back pain. Direct costs, namely expenses, which originated out of treating the pain, were 46 %. Correspondingly, indirect costs, namely losses of production, stood at about 54 %. The highest costs occurred at the age of 50.
Among patients who claimed benefits, social circumstances such as unemployment, low education and living alone also appeared to increase costs. The researchers found the clearest correlation between pain grade and costs.
Expenses caused by prevention or therapy measures represented a share in of 9.7%.
The study results suggest that effective prevention programs can lower expenses both in the private and public sectors.
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