[Costs of chronic heart failure in spain]

This study calculates the costs of the prevalence of chronic heart failure in Spain during 1993. Since the precise values of the rate of prevalence are unknown, two calculation procedures are designs. In order to proxy the rate of prevalence two different questionnaires are addressed to primary care doctors and to cardiologists. The registers of discharged patients from hospitals are also used for obtaining this rate. The so computed prevalence rate turned out to be 5.3 per thousand. Nevertheless a rate of 10 per thousand is also used for the cost calculation. The reason is that this last value is located in the middle of the rank of values quoted by several authors. The annual health service costs are between 64,028 and 110,240 millions pesetas (depending on the assumed prevalence) what means a cost of illness between 1.8 and 3.1% of the Health Department budget for 1993. The study proposes a method to calculate the prevalence of the chronic heart failure that searches simultaneously for information on costing of the clinical treatments, the study also presents disaggregated information by assistance level and their respective economic cost.