San Francisco : The number of Americans with diabetes may almost double in 25 years, and the annual cost of treating them may triple to $336 billion (Dh1.2 trillion), according to a study published yesterday in the journal Diabetes Care.
Without new programmes to assure that people get health care to manage their condition, 44.1 million people in the US will have diabetes by 2034, from 23.7 million yesterday, the report said.
Budgeting help
The number of diabetics on Medicare, the government plan for the elderly, will reach 14.1 million from 6.5 million currently.
The analysis by researchers at the University of Chicago was intended to give White House and Congressional budget officials a way to estimate costs over time, said Michael O'Grady, a senior fellow at the university's National Opinion Research Centre.
Diabetes drugs were the fourth-best selling medications in 2008, with $27.3 billion in global sales, according to IMS Health, a Norwalk, Connecticut-based company that tracks prescription trends.
"To do nothing is going to be extremely expensive," O'Grady said in a November 24 telephone interview. "It's going to mean millions of Americans continuing to get this disease and a lot of heartache."
Copenhagen-based Novo Nordisk, the world's biggest maker of insulin, funded the study.
The company sold $6.1 billion of insulin products in 2008.
Diabetes prevents people from breaking down sugar in their blood and can lead to complications including heart disease, kidney disease, vision loss and amputation of limbs. While some people have an inherited form of the condition, the majority of cases are linked to obesity.
The analysis by O'Grady and his colleagues included the impact of ageing and obesity rates as well as the natural progression of the disease over time to come up with estimates on numbers and costs. They found diabetes treatment estimates of $113 billion this year would increase to $336 billion by 2033.
Long-term savings
In their earlier work, the researchers concluded that the costs of paying for new programmes would save money over time for people in their 20s, break even for people in their 30s and 40s, and cost more for people in their 50s and older.
"You have to spend money up front but you avoid blindness, kidney disease, amputations, heart attacks and stroke," he said.
"You can use savings from the young to offset the expenditures in the older groups," O'Grady said.