General Obstetrics and Gynecology: GynecologyHealth care resource use for uterine fibroid tumors in the United States
Section snippets
Methods
There are several national databases that track health care use. We combined information from databases on inpatient care, ambulatory surgery, and outpatient care to estimate the total use of resources to care for fibroid tumors and to estimate the total cost to the health care system in the year 2000 to care for this condition. Because this study used existing public databases that contain only de-identified patient information, this study was exempted from Institutional Review Board
Inpatient and surgical care
Table II shows the estimates of office visits, outpatient clinical visits, and emergency department visits and of inpatient and ambulatory procedures and admissions for US women >15 years old for the years 1996 and 2000. Over the 5-year period, the total number of inpatient procedures increased by 38% (from 255,000 in 1996 to 352,500 in 2000), with hysterectomy by far the most common procedure to be performed every year. The increase in inpatient care appears to be mainly due to a 36% increase
Comment
To our knowledge, this is the first published estimation of the total disease burden of uterine fibroid tumors. Previous studies have focused on hospital costs that were associated with specific procedures.4, 7, 8, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 There is a paucity of literature concerning the total burden of fibroid tumors in the United States, and we were unable to identify any other studies that have documented the total direct cost to care for this condition, which makes comparisons difficult. In
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Reprints not available from the authors. Address correspondence to Michael K. Flynn, MD, MHS, 601 Elmwood Avenue, Box 668, Rochester NY, 14642.