A Few Diabetes Facts From Express Scripts

Here’s a summary of some of the data from the latest Express Scripts Drug Trend Report relative to Diabetes.

• 26M Americans have diabetes
• 15% of Americans (or 39M) will have diabetes by 2020
• Diabetes costs $194B per year (health spending) and that is expected to rise to $500B by the end of the decade
• 41% of diabetes are non-adherent to their medications
• 60% of diabetics using insulin don’t regularly self-monitor their blood glucose levels
• The drug costs are $81.12 PMPY (based on high utilization of metformin (a generic)) with 14.91 Rxs per user per year (which seems low since the average diabetic takes 5 medications from what I know)

This gives you some data, but I pulled this data from an older blog post of mine from the ADA…

I found this list of diabetes fact from the American Diabetes Association in an article I was reading:

• 25.8M children and adults in the US have diabetes (8.3% of the population).  This includes 7.0M who haven’t yet been diagnosed.
• 1.9M new cases of diabetes were diagnosed in people 20+ in 2010.
• 215,000 or 0.26% of all people under 20 have diabetes.
• In 2007, diabetes was listed as the underlying cause of death on 71,382 death certificates and as a contributing factor on another 160.022 death certificates.
• Adults with diabetes have heart disease death rates 2-4x higher than adults without diabetes.
• The risk for stroke is 2-4x higher for people with diabetes.
• Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness among adults ages 20-74.
• Diabetes is the leading cause of failure accounting for 44% of new cases in 2008.
• Total cost of diagnosed diabetes in the US was $174B in 2007.

And, depending on if you focus on pre-diabetics, the population becomes even larger.  I expect with more and more companies doing onsite biometric screening that the population in diabetes management programs will increase significantly over the next few years.  The keys will be treating them differently based on risk, disease understanding, and patient preferences to make the programs cost effective.