Treatment Status and Healthcare Cost Trends for Patients with Multiple Sclerosis in Japan: A Claims Database Analysis

The healthcare situation of multiple sclerosis (MS) and its course are not being thoroughly investigated in Japan. We aimed to examine the current healthcare situation, including treatment and healthcare costs, of MS according to duration since its first diagnosis using Japanese real-world data to determine unidentified healthcare issues at each disease stage.

This retrospective, non-comparative, non-interventional study used a Japanese nationwide claims database (April 2008-August 2018) comprising 20 million patients from 329 acute care hospitals (as of June 2018). Treatment patterns, comorbidities, healthcare resource utilization, and healthcare costs were analyzed using longitudinal analyses of patients with MS according to duration since the first diagnosis. The time from diagnosis to first treatment was examined using Kaplan-Meier analysis.

We identified 7067 patients with MS [mean (standard deviation) age at first diagnosis 45.0 (16.2) years]. About 70% of the patients did not receive disease-modifying therapy (DMT) within the first year of diagnosis. The frequency of DMT use decreased in patients with a longer duration since the first diagnosis. MS treatment costs tended to increase with a longer duration from the first diagnosis until 9 years, followed by a tendency to decrease; contrastingly, other healthcare costs tended to increase with duration after decreasing from the year of the first diagnosis to the next year. The frequencies of hospitalizations and hospital visits, healthcare costs-excluding those for MS treatment and tests-and prevalence of comorbidities tended to be higher in patients with a longer duration since the first diagnosis.

A considerable proportion of patients did not receive DMT, suggesting that patients with early-stage MS may lose the opportunity to improve their prognosis through early intervention with DMT. Among patients with a longer duration since the first diagnosis, fewer treatment choices may be available despite the larger clinical and treatment burden.