Nakamura K, Okamura T, Miura K, Okayama A. Hypertension and medical expenditure in the Japanese population: Review of prospective studies. World J Cardiol 2014; 6(7): 531-538 [PMID: 25068014 DOI: 10.4330/wjc.v6.i7.531]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Koshi Nakamura, MD, PhD, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Kanazawa Medical University, 1-1 Daigaku, Uchinada, Ishikawa 920-0293, Japan. knaka@kanazawa-med.ac.jp
Research Domain of This Article
Health Care Sciences & Services
Article-Type of This Article
Topic Highlight
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Koshi Nakamura, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Kanazawa Medical University, Ishikawa 920-0293, Japan
Tomonori Okamura, Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, School of Medicine, Keio University, Tokyo 160-8582, Japan
Katsuyuki Miura, Department of Public Health, and Center for Epidemiologic Research in Asia, Shiga University of Medical Science, Shiga 520-2192, Japan
Akira Okayama, Research Institute of Strategy for Prevention, Tokyo 101-0061, Japan
Author contributions: Nakamura K conceived of this review and drafted the manuscript; Okamura T, Miura K and Okayama A reviewed the manuscript and made the final corrections before submission; all authors read and approved the final version.
Correspondence to: Koshi Nakamura, MD, PhD, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Kanazawa Medical University, 1-1 Daigaku, Uchinada, Ishikawa 920-0293, Japan. knaka@kanazawa-med.ac.jp
Telephone: +81-76-2188093 Fax: +81-76-2863728
Received: December 20, 2013 Revised: February 11, 2014 Accepted: May 16, 2014 Published online: July 26, 2014 Processing time: 243 Days and 6.3 Hours
Core Tip
Core tip: Hypertension is likely to affect medical economics. We reviewed articles published on prospective cohort studies that measured medical expenditure attributable to hypertension in community-dwelling populations in Japan. Personal medical expenditure attributable to hypertension increased with worsening severity of the condition. Medical expenditure was increased further in hypertensive patients who had another concomitant cardiovascular risk factor. In particular, hypertension, especially moderate-to-severe untreated hypertension, increased the risk of long-term hospitalization. This resulted in considerably higher medical expenditure, compared with non-hospitalized cases. However, from a population perspective, medical expenditure attributable to hypertension is mainly from pre-to-mild hypertension.
