Cost of Illness Studies

A total of 37 studies were extracted for full review. After reviewing the text of all the articles, 6 were excluded because the studies were not cost of illness (Hedrick 1971; Hollingworth et al. 2007; Relyea-Chew et al. 2009; Macciocchi et al. 2004; Smith et al. 2012; Young-Hughes & Simbartl 2011) and 17 analyzed a specific patient population within SCI (French et al. 2007; Gore et al. 2013; Hung et al. 2012; Jawa et al. 2011; Jones et al. 2003; Kitchener et al. 2005; Mac-Thiong et al. 2012; Liu et al. 1994; Morgan et al. 2008; Palsbo et al. 2006; Smith et al. 2003; Stroupe et al. 2011; St. Andre et al. 2011; Sundance et al. 2004; Webster et al. 2004; Yu 2003, 2008) one study was for spine trauma (Chu et al. 2009) and one study only focused on monetizing informal care (Sapountzi-Krepia et al. 2006). The remaining 12 studies of the general SCI population were critically appraised.

In general, the SCI cost of illness studies spanned six different countries, presented results from costs as early as 1999, were mostly based on an observational cohort and calculated gross costs in an incidence cohort without a non-SCI comparator. Only two studies included indirect costs (Garcia-Altes et al. 2012; Kawu et al. 2011) or sensitivity analyses (Garcia-Altes et al. 2012; Cao et al. 2011). Cost perspective and health care settings included in the studies varied.

For each study a summary of the results including the costs adjusted to 2018 US dollars ($1 US dollar= $1.29 CA dollar 2018) is presented below. The results presented focus on the cost per patient. Due to the differences in health care systems, studies were stratified by country.