Diabetics, be ready to buy your drug for the disease at a cost nearly 70 percent more compared to what it costs now by 2009! It’s the growing diabetes epidemic as well as more aggressive treatment of the disease with combination drug therapies that will lead to this soaring price, Medco Health Solutions Inc. predicts.
In an interview, Dr. Lon Castle, director of medical policy for Medco, said:
There are going to be a lot more drugs coming out and more and more people with type 2 diabetes will catapult diabetes to the number one class in driving year over year spending growth.
The analysis projects that, by 2009, spending on medicines to treat diabetes could soar by 60 percent to 68 percent from 2006 levels.
With the diabetes drug-use increased 5.1 percent from 2005 to 2006, trailing cholesterol medications, spent on diabetes treatments has increased 14.5 percent.
It is in 2005, diabetes drugs sales in the U.S. reached $9.88 billion! This is revealed by the data from IMS Health Inc. projecting an astounding figure, the analysis reveal that by 2009, expenditure on diabetes treatment medicines could soar by 60 percent to 68 percent from 2006 levels.
With new findings coming up, newer drugs acting on new targets are increasingly being prescribed as first-line therapy. These are thus, frequently used in combination with other drugs as well. This is eventually pushing up treatment costs this year as a whole to a large extend, with the trend seeming to go even forward.
