Estimation of Annual Health Care Costs for Adults with Type 1 Diabetes in the United States

Diabetes health care resource utilization (HCRU) studies tend to focus on patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D) or pool patients with T2D and type 1 diabetes (T1D). There is a paucity of recent data on the cost of treating patients with T1D in the United States. To (a) estimate the per-patient per-year (PPPY) HCRU and costs, from a payer perspective, associated with treating U.S. adults with T1D and (b) compare these with the HCRU and costs for patients with T2D. This retrospective cohort study used claims data from the Optum Clinformatics database between January 2015 and December 2017. Adults (aged ≥ 18 years) with a diagnosis of T1D were propensity score-matched to adults with T2D. Overall and nondiabetes-related HCRU and costs were assessed for T1D and T2D and compared between the 2 groups. Propensity scores were used to match 10,103 patient pairs from T1D and T2D cohorts (mean ages 54.4 and 56.9 years, respectively). In the T1D cohort, inpatient, emergency department (ED), outpatient, and prescription claims occurred in 14.0%, 17.3%, 85.5%, and 100% of patients, respectively, resulting in a mean total cost of U.S. $18,817 PPPY (diabetes-related = $11,002; nondiabetes-related = $7,816). The T1D cohort had significantly higher mean total costs than the T2D cohort ($18,817 vs. $14,148 PPPY; < 0.001). When extrapolating these findings to a commercial health plan with 1 million covered lives, the estimated total direct medical costs of T1D would be $103.4 million. This study showed that the total annual cost of managing an adult with T1D is significantly higher than that of an adult with T2D. Nondiabetes costs accounted for 40% of the total per-patient cost, similar to patients with T2D, confirming that as patients with T1D live longer lives, they may also be at greater risk for cardiometabolic complications. This study was funded by Sanofi U.S. and Lexicon Pharmaceuticals as part of a business partnership in a diabetes program at the time this study was conducted. Joish and Davies are employees and stockholders of Lexicon Pharmaceuticals. Zhou, Preblick, and Paranjape are employees and stockholders of Sanofi. Lin was a postdoctoral fellow at Sanofi through Rutgers University during this project. Deshpande provided consulting services through Communication Symmetry. Verma is an employee of Evidera, which was contracted by Sanofi for work on this study. Pettus is a consultant for Diasome, Insulet, Lexicon, Lilly, Mannkind, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, and Senseonics