Economic assessment of peptic ulcer disease treatments.

The cost and economic outcomes of peptic ulcer disease (PUD) treatments are important but uncommonly assessed by clinical researchers in gastroenterology. There is a growing interest in these assessments because of their implications for patient management and health care planning. Also, cost assessments offer the clinical researcher a powerful method to analyze the socioeconomic impact of different therapies in randomized prospective studies. The purposes of this paper are 1) to present methods and results of cost and economic assessment of PUD and 2) to consider the impact of H2 receptor antagonists on PUD cost. As with any chronic disease, PUD has direct and indirect costs. Direct costs are for hospital and clinic care, physicians' and surgeons' services, pharmacy fees, and nursing home care. Indirect costs of PUD affect society and include costs of absenteeism from work, disability, and mortality. Direct and indirect costs can be estimated prospectively in short-term and maintenance PUD clinical research studies. Several cost and economic analyses of PUD have been reported by clinical investigators and medical economists of different countries. They report a significant change in the direct and indirect costs of peptic ulcer treatment after the introduction of the H2 receptor antagonists.