[Economic concepts for measuring the costs of illness of osteoporosis: an international comparison].

Worldwide osteoporosis is underestimated and despite availability of effective and cost effective treatments, these are often not implemented. Apart from a demographically driven increase in disease cases, failure to implement or tardy implementation of preventive measures as well as poor treatment compliance leads to a deterioration of the health economic outcomes. This in turn causes considerable costs to the health care system and to society, through ineffective intake of medication, diminished quality of life and inability to work as well as substantial costs of rehabilitation of patients. Health economic analyses and methods are increasingly used by decision makers to set priorities and evaluate alternative treatment measures about their cost-effectiveness. In order to be able to capture the costs of illness incurred by osteoporosis, different diseases specific models and methods have been developed, such as the reference model of the IOF, an osteoporosis-specific Markov model or internationally comparable intervention thresholds. Health economists estimate that osteoporosis-related costs will double by 2050 in both Europe and the individual countries. For Europe this means an increase from 40 billion Euro in 2000 to almost 80 billion Euro in 2050. In Austria, an aggregation of the different costs of osteoporosis is not possible, due to a lack of comparability and availability of data. The international ICUROS study and the Austrian Osteoporosis Report 2007 are the first steps towards counteracting this situation.