[Economic public health aspects of benign prostatic hyperplasia in Austria]

Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) is one of the most frequent diseases in advanced aged men. The introduction of a new coding system (ICD-VESKA) in 1989 made it possible to analyze the number of hospitalized cases and to calculate the costs of inpatient care. In 1990 10,710 BPH cases were treated within Austrian hospitals. Controlling for multiple entries 9,742 individual patients (269.4 per 100,000) were treated 138,761 days. Case fatality was 0.5% (46 deaths). The number of inpatients comprises only the top 1,3% of morbidity, the total number is estimated with 770,000 patients. Based on the official nursing fees total costs in public affiliated hospitals were AS 250 millions. Including private hospitals total costs increase to AS 306 millions. The inpatient care of BPH represents only a small proportion of the total health and economic burden, which obviously mainly occurs in the outpatient system. Therefore BPH is one of the diseases of which social and economic importance is usually underestimated due to a lack of information.