Background/Purpose:

Significant evidence in the scholarly literature suggests that depression is a common comorbidity among patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) causing significant burden for the healthcare system. However, no studies are available for Japan and, hence, this is the first attempt to systematically assess the cost of depression in an RA patient cohort.

Methods:

We used a large administrative claims data base (JMDC) to calculate prevalence and associated costs of depression within RA patients between March 2009 and September 2015. Descriptive statistics is used to describe baseline characteristics of included patients, healthcare utilization and total health care cost. Propensity score matching is applied to eliminate confounding effects (potential imbalances in baseline covariates) using 1:4 matching type.

Results:

We identified 101,512 patients in the database with neither RA or depression diagnosis. 6,838 were diagnosed with RA but not with depression and 473 had a co-diagnosis of depression and RA indicating a prevalence of depression within RA patients of 6.5%. After matching, RA patients with depression had 55% more outpatient visits (p=0.010) and caused 46% higher health care costs than those without depression (p=0.000). Mean healthcare costs per patient per month was 102,101 JPY for the former and 70,079 JPY for the latter population.

Conclusion:

A co-morbidity of RA patients with depression adds significant costs to the healthcare system and rheumatologists should be aware of this co-morbidity to ensure timely treatment initiation when necessary.

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ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/estimating-prevalence-and-cost-of-depression-among-japanese-ra-patients-a-retrospective-claims-data-base-analysis/