Estimating costs of diabetes complications in people <65 years in the U.S. using panel data

To estimate the cost of diabetes complications in the United States (U.S.).

We constructed longitudinal panel data using one of the largest claims databases in the U.S. for privately insured Type 1 (T1DM) and type 2 (T2DM) diabetes patients with a follow-up time of one to ten years. Complication costs were estimated both in years of the first occurrence and in subsequent years, using individual fixed-effects models. All costs were in 2016 dollars.

47,166 people with T1DM and 608,237 with T2DM were included in our study. Aside from organ transplants, which were rare, the estimated average costs for the top three most costly conditions in the first vs. subsequent years were: end stage renal disease ($73,534 vs. $97,431 for T1DM; $94,231 vs. $98,981 for T2DM), congestive heart failure ($41,681 vs. $14,855 for T1DM; $31,202 vs. $7062 for T2DM), and myocardial infarction ($40,899 vs. $9496 for T1DM; $45,251 vs. $8572 for T2DM). For both diabetes types, retinopathy and neuropathy tend to have the lowest cost estimates.

Our study provides the latest and most comprehensive cost estimates for a broad set of diabetes complications needed to evaluate the long-term cost-effectiveness of interventions for preventing and managing diabetes.