The Direct Medical Cost of Essential Tremor

Objectives: The aim of the study was to determine the direct medical cost of illness from essential tremor (ET) from a patient perspective.

Methods: Secondary data from the Optum's de-identified Clinformatics® Data Mart Database from 2018-2019 were used to assess medical resource utilization and costs. Propensity score matching was used to match patients aged 40+ to statistically similar controls. Generalized linear models were used to estimate average, adjusted total costs of care per year, by healthcare setting, and provider specialty.

Results: The final sample included 41,200 patients with at least one ET claim and 36,871 matched patients. Overall, ET patients aged 40+ had about USD 28,217 in direct medical costs per year, which was about USD 1,601 more than matched comparisons (p < 0.001). This was driven by greater number of outpatient visits overall and with specialists. Extrapolating the estimates from our study and pairing them with published age-specific disease prevalence statistics for ET, we calculated an annual cost for direct medical care of ET patients aged 40+ to be about USD 9.4 billion.

Conclusion: The estimated direct medical costs among adults aged 40+ with an ET diagnosis aggregated to the population level are nontrivial.