Supplementary Material for: The Direct Medical Cost of Essential Tremor

Objectives: To determine the direct medical cost of illness from essential tremor (ET) from a patient perspective.
Methods: Secondary data from the Optum’s de-identified Clinformatics® Data Mart Database (CDM) from 2018-2019 was used to assess medical resource utilization and costs. Propensity score matching was used to match patients age 40+ with to statistically similar controls. Generalized linear models were used to estimate average, adjusted total costs of care per year, by health care setting, and provider specialty.
Results: The final sample included 41,200 patients with at least one ET claim and 36,871 matched patients. Overall, ET patients ages 40+ had about $28,217 in direct medical costs per year, which was about $1,601 more than matched comparisons (p < 0.001). This was driven by greater number of outpatient visits overall and with specialists. Extrapolating the estimates from our study and pairing them with published age-specific disease prevalence statistics for ET, we calculated an annual cost for direct medical care of ET patients ages 40+ to be about $9.4 billion.
Conclusion: The estimated direct medical costs among adults age 40+ with an ET diagnosis aggregated to the population-level are non-trivial.