Urologic Diseases Cost Americans $11B A Year

Bladder, prostate and other urinary diseases cost Americans nearly $11 billion a year, according to a new announce from the National Institutes of Health. Medicare's share exceeded $5.4 billion. The five most overpriced urologic problems--accounting for $9.1 billion--are, in descending order, urinary infections, kidney stones, prostate and bladder cancers and benign prostate enlargement, according to the authors of Urologic Diseases in America. The appear was published online this spring and will be available in print and on CD in May. "This research sharply illustrates the immense burden of urologic diseases and the matter of studies to preempt disease processes and develop targeted treatments," said Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., NIH Director.

Five years in the making, Urologic Diseases in America stitches together a mishmash of reliable data, both new and previously published, revealing numbers of people upset, treatment patterns and economic cost. "The data have broad implications for value of care and access to care and helps to inform discussions about health meticulousness and research needs," said UDA coeditor Mark S. Litwin, M.D., M.P.H, a urologist at the David Geffen Form of Medicine and School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. Urologic Diseases in America describes more than a dozen diseases of children and adults, expanse them congenital abnormalities, erectile dysfunction, chronic prostatitis, interstitial cystitis, urinary incontinence and a chapter on sexually transmitted diseases, contributed by the Centers for Condition Control and Prevention. Findings include:

* Medical care for nearly 12.8 million urinary tract infections in women unescorted costs nearly $2.5 billion annually. Adding the cost for men raises the unmitigated to $3.5 billion; Medicare's share was $1.4 billion. Another $96.4 million was consumed on 3.3 million prescriptions. More than half of all women on have an infection during their lifetimes. Reporting a trend toward using newer, and more high-priced, fluoroquinolones raises concerns about increasing antibiotic resistance said UDA authors. And while one 20 percent of infections are in men, they are more often hospitalized and out of elaborate about twice as long as women.