A study by researchers at Oxford Population Health’s Health Economics Research Centre has found that the annual cost of dementia, heart disease, cancer, and stroke could rise to £86bn a year by 2050, demonstrating that interventions to treat and prevent these diseases are urgently required. The study is published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity.
Dementia, heart disease, cancer, and stroke are four of the most common contributors towards ill-health, disability, and death in the UK. As public health initiatives and access to treatments have improved, people are living for longer but it is making them more vulnerable to age-related disease. In 2019, the four conditions covered by this study were responsible for 59% of deaths in England and caused the loss of 5.1 million healthy life years.
The researchers looked at anonymised GP and hospital health records for 4.2 million people living in England to gather data on the number of people living with these four major conditions and the number of people who had died from one or more of them in 2018. They then used this data to estimate the cost of each condition for 2018 and to work out how much each one is likely to cost by 2050.
These estimated costs presented by the study represent the overall economic cost of each of the conditions which includes lost productivity (the contribution to the economy made by people working) and the cost of informal care provided by patients’ relatives and friends as well as the financial cost to the NHS and social care services.
Key findings:
- The annual cost of dementia, heart disease, cancer, and stroke in England was £51.9bn in 2018. This cost is estimated to rise by 59% to £86bn a year by 2050;
- When looking at the increase in costs for individual diseases, the cost of dementia is estimated to double by 2050 to £23.5bn. Over the same period, the cost of heart disease is estimated to increase by 54% to £19.6bn and the financial impact of strokes is estimated to increase by 85% to £16bn;
- The cost of cancer, the condition with the highest economic cost, is estimated to increase by 40% to £26.5bn by 2050;
- The largest contributor to the increase in costs is likely to be social care, the cost of which is estimated to rise by 110% to £13.5bn per year for dementia by 2050. Social care costs for heart disease, cancer, and stroke are estimated to increase by 91% (to £4.4bn), 88% (to £2.9n) and 109% (to £7.1bn) respectively.
Ramon Luengo-Fernandez, Associate Professor of Health Economics at Oxford Population Health, said ‘The results of our study demonstrate that it is vitally important that governments, policymakers, and healthcare providers place a greater emphasis on ensuring that people not only live longer but stay healthy for longer by investing in preventing disease at younger ages. It has been previously shown that increased physical activity, better diet, and stopping smoking may help with this and we should be looking at how we can enable this for as many people as possible. It is also important that we invest in primary care services to ensure that people with life-threatening diseases are correctly diagnosed and offered treatment as soon as possible to enhance their chances of making a full recovery.’
The study was funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK