Social costs associated with fibromyalgia in Spain

Fibromyalgia is a chronic rheumatic disease of unknown aetiology, highly disabling and mainly affecting women. The aim of our work is to estimate, on a national scale, the economic impact of this disease on the employment of patients and non-professional (informal) care dimension.

Survey on Disabilities, Autonomy and Dependency carried out in Spain in 2020/21 was used to obtain information on disabled individuals with AD and their informal caregivers. Six estimation scenarios were defined as base case, depending on whether the maximum daily informal caregiving time was censored or not, and on the approach chosen for the valuation of informal caregiving time (contingent valuation and replacement time). Another six conservative scenarios were developed using the minimum wage for the estimation of labour losses.

Our estimates range from 2,443.6 (willingness to pay, censored informal care time) to 7,164.8 million euros (replacement cost, uncensored informal care time) (base year 2021). Multivariate analyses identified that the degree of dependency of the person suffering from fibromyalgia is the main explanatory variable for both the probability of being employed and the time spent in informal care. Conservative scenarios estimates range from 1,807 to 6,528 million euros.

The high economic impact revealed should help to position a health problem that is relatively unknown in society and for which there are significant research and care gaps to be filled.