Economic impact on health-care costs related to major diseases including HIV/AIDS due to alcohol drinking among Thai populations.(2009)

Economic Impact on Health-Care Costs Related to MajorDiseases Including HIV/AIDS
due to Alcohol Drinking among Thai Populations.

Prapag Neramitpitagkul ^1,2 Chanida Lertpitakpong ² Jomkwan Yothasamut ²

Montarat Thavorncharoensap ^1,2 Usa Chaikledkaew ^1,2 Yot Teerawattananon ²

¹Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Pharmacy, Mahidol University, Bangkok,Thailand
²Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program, Ministry of Public Health, Nonthaburi,Thailand

Objective

The objective of this study was to estimate health-care costs because of diseases caused by alcohol consumption based on health system’ s perspective.

Methods 

Total direct health-care costs of alcohol drinking were the summation of the costs of alcohol drinking in inpatient and outpatient departments due to chronic diseases and acute conditions using prevalence-based approach. The alcohol-attributable fractions, defined as the proportion of a disease or acute condition in a population attributable to alcohol drinking, were calculated to obtain the number of patients in each disease or acute condition attributable to alcohol drinking. Health-care costs of alcohol drinking were estimated by multiplying the number of patients in each disease category attributable to alcohol drinking with the unit cost of treatment.

Results

Total health-care costs attributed to alcohol in this research were 5491 million baht (i.e., outpatient department [2488 million baht] and inpatient department [3003 million baht]). Cost derived from inpatient department accounted for 55% of the total health-care cost attributed to alcohol.

Conclusions

The result of this study suggested that alcohol drinking was significantly associated with a large number of health-care costs in Thailand. Estimation of health-care costs related to alcohol drinking would provide an important insight into future policy appraisal and evaluation. 

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