Treatment experience, burden, and unmet needs (TRIBUNE) in Multiple Sclerosis study: the costs and utilities of MS patients in The Netherlands

Abstract

Patients were selected from specialized treatment centers, therefore this sample may not be representative of the entire MS population in The Netherlands, i.e., few patients not receiving MS therapies were included. In addition, only a few patients with severe disability were included in the study sample; therefore, results for this disease severity sub-group should be interpreted with caution.

Living with Multiple Sclerosis in Europe: Pharmacological Treatments, Cost of Illness, and Health-Related Quality of Life Across Countries

“…The NEDBase, the national Dutch registry, started in 2007 involves six neurological centers. Some comprehensive studies have measured the burden imposed by MS on the Dutch society, which is higher compared to the results of previous studies (65). Recent studies examine both adherence and persistence and outline how the latter could be predicted by HRQoL (66).…”

Cost of Illness of Multiple Sclerosis - A systematic review

“…As can be seen from Table 3 costs data used in the included studies were based on data with differences of levels of specification. For example, studies by Auty [33] and by Taylor [61] had few specified data, and included only short term absence as regards indirect costs, as compared to the high specifications of data and inclusion also of long term sickness absence in the studies by Kobelt [25,[44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51] and Karampampa [37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. The difference of estimated cost per patient corresponded to almost 50%, i.e.…”

“…There were 17 countries covered by the included studies. Ten of the studies were conducted by the same Swedish group of authors [25,[44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53] and seven studies were done by another group with connections to Sweden [37][38][39][40][41][42][43], resulting in that 17 (59%) of the studies were conducted by two Swedish research centers.…”

“…The cost driver varied more between studies in the moderate severity group, EDSS II, where it was identified as drugs or MS treatment [37,[39][40][41], permanent reductions in productive work [26,38,43], other classifications of indirect costs [57,58], and informal care [42]. Four out of ten studies [38,[40][41][42] identified informal care as the main cost driver for individuals in the most severe group, EDSS III, whereas four studies identified production losses due to permanent reductions in productive work [26,37,39,43] and two identified other types of indirect costs [57,58].…”

“…It has e.g., been argued that there might be contextual differences for patients with MS to rely on family members or on friends for informal care, which can also affect the calculated cost for informal care [51]. As the included studies categorized informal care as an unspecified direct cost [27,34,35,52,53], as a direct nonmedical cost [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]53], presented separately from direct and indirect costs [58] or, as an indirect cost [26,57], Included cost categories, as well as e.g., proportions will differ due to methodological choices.…”