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Title: Cost of Newer Epilepsy Drugs Prove Worth in Cutting Overall Health Resource Use: Presented at AES

"Cost of Newer Epilepsy Drugs Prove Worth in Cutting Overall Health Resource Use: Presented at AES"

By Howard Fenton WASHINGTON, DC -- December 7, 2005 -- Although one of the newer anti-epilepsy drugs costs substantially more than first generation anti-epileptics, patients and doctors should realize that the cost of the pill is often the least expensive part of treatment. That's part of what researchers found when they compared total costs of caring for epileptic patients based on whether the patient was being treated with levetiracetam (Keppra) -- one of the newer drugs -- or with phenytoin, an older medication. Patricia Grossman, MBA, and Health Outcomes Research Manager for UCB Pharma, Inc. and colleagues conducted an evaluation of levetiracetam and phenytoin as monotherapy. UCB markets Keppra and sponsored the study. She selected 348 patients receiving Keppra and 348 from historical records who were on phenytoin. The researchers captured data from the PharMetrics Patient-Centric Database, which contains patient-level fully adjudicated medical and pharmaceutical claims for more than 45 million unique patients from more than 80 health plans across the United States. During the 9-months considered in the study, the pharmacy costs associated with taking the newer anti-epileptic were higher -- US $2,841 for Keppra versus $2,054 for those on phenytoin. The outpatient's costs were $7,744 for Keppra patients versus $8,440 for phenytoin patients. The major difference, however, occurred in hospitalizations. The average Keppra patients cost $5,306 in in-patient coverage while the average patient on phenytoin spent $11,857 on hospital costs. The difference between those two factors was statistically significant. "When comparing levetiracetam with a classic first generation anti-epileptic drug, health care providers should consider all healthcare utilization and costs and not just pharmacy costs," Grossman said at her poster presentation December 5[^th at the annual joint meeting of the American Epilepsy Society (AES) and the American Clinical Neurophysiology Society.

"That is really the major implications of my study," Grossman said. "It is a message I am hoping that health management organizations with understand, and something that doctors and their patients will understand.

"You need to look at the overall costs of treating a patient, not just the cost of the drug," she said.

[Presentation title: Comparison of Healthcare Utilization and Cost of Levetiracetam to Phenytoin Monotherapy Using a Retrospective Claim Analysis. Abstract 2.357]

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