Policy & Practice

The Cost of Juvenile Arthritis

Treating juvenile ideopathic arthritis, the most common rheumatologic disease in childhood, carries a steep price tag, according to a study conducted by Canadian researchers and published in the February issue of Arthritis Care and Research. The average annual direct costs associated with treating these children is approximately $3,002 in 2005 Canadian dollars, about $1,686 more than the cost for children in a control group. The study was conducted at the Montreal Children's Hospital and British Columbia's Children's Hospital in Vancouver. Researchers compared 155 children who were diagnosed with juvenile arthritis and who sought treatment at the two outpatient clinics with 181 children, primarily with other chronic diseases, who sought treatment there. The chronic conditions most common among children in the control group included epilepsy, diabetes, asthma, and other breathing disorders. The bulk of the increased cost associated with treating children with juvenile arthritis was from medication costs, which were estimated at about $1,306 on average in the juvenile arthritis group, compared with $87 in the control group. Although the researchers did not estimate the indirect costs of the disease, they noted that the juvenile arthritis patients in the study tended on average to miss more days of school than did controls.