Don’t let chronic disease rob us of the benefits of medical innovation

Nuala Moran, Senior Editor at Science|Business

Such a donation – from one of the companies that helped to get us into this mess – looks like an act of the archest cynicism.

But someone needs to do something. As the US economic think tank, the Milken Institute points outs this week, the cost of chronic disease is set to skyrocket as the population ages. According to the institute’s latest report, “An unhealthy America: the economic burden of chronic disease,” in 2003 there were a staggering 162 million cases of the seven most common chronic diseases – cancer, diabetes, heart diseases, hypertension, stroke, mental disorders and pulmonary conditions.

Some poor souls were unlucky enough to be afflicted with more than one of these diseases, meaning that in total 109 million Americans were struggling under this burden.

According to the Milken Institute’s figures, the economic impact of all this ill health was $1.3 trillion – made up of $277 billion of treatment costs and just over $1.1 trillion of lost productivity.

Don’t take it for granted

The chronic disease epidemic may seem to be at odds with the fact that in developed countries we are told we are all living longer and enjoying a higher quality of life. The point is that – soberingly – the healthcare improvements that medical innovation has delivered over the past few decades can no longer be taken for granted.

As the report puts it, “While treatment outcomes and mortality have been improving, the rates of chronic disease are steadily increasing, and if left to grow unchecked, threaten to cancel out these gains.”

Looking forward, the Milken Institute predicts that without action the total cost to the US of chronic disease will rise to $4.1 trillion in 2023. By cleaning up the western diet and lifestyle, reducing obesity and cutting down on smoking, this could be reduced to $3 trillion. Which is still a very big number.

Chronic, lifestyle-abetted disease, is about far more than unnecessary suffering, it is also about money. For companies it is about the economic impact of lost workdays, lower productivity, shrinking markets.

Seen from this perspective, putting a hand in its pocket to fund research into preventing chronic disease is about more than PepsiCo reaching for the fig leaf of corporate social responsibility to disguise its possible role in all this.

The prospect that the effect of healthcare innovation, which has increased our quality of life and life expectancy, will be swamped by the rising tide of chronic disease cannot be countenanced. There is a need to switch attention and research budgets to prevention and early intervention.

Medical innovation has long been seen as a major contributor to economic development. But as it is now turning out, it is also key to avoiding economic stagnation.