General disease costing principles

The term “disease costing” applies to those economic appraisal methodologies that ascertain the cost borne by a community because of a disease. This approach has been used to calculate the social and economic costs, in terms of loss of productivity, caused by a disease that only in the most serious cases results in the death of an individual. The production loss- es, also defined as indirect costs, are not the only social costs caused by diseases. In addition we point also to the negative variations that are reflected onto two fundamental quan- tities: consumption of resources and state of health. In addition to produc- tion losses and consumption of resources, the third group is unques- tionably the most important in the healthcare sector, since it deals direct- ly with variations in the state of health. This group is denoted by the term “human costs”. In the headache field, we are far behind other patholo- gies, where there is a greater knowl- edge of the economic aspects of both the pathology-related costs and the likely benefits resulting from differ- ent therapeutical approaches. Notwithstanding the disease costing problems that are also reflected in the cost-benefit techniques, it is impor- tant for the economic analysis to gain ground since there is a growing need to keep account of the available resources and the results attainable in the healthcare policies, from the cen- tral to the peripheral levels, where the valuation tools prove even more expedient.