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Boomers Much More Likely Than Seniors to Seek Help
for Headaches
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Who Gets
Headaches |
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Percentage of ambulatory &
prescribed drug expenditures attributable to headaches - by age,
average annual 2002-03 |
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March 16, 2006 – Senior citizens may be surprised
to learn that they are the age group (age 65 and older) least likely to
seek medical help from headaches. It's those Baby Boomers age 45 to 64
who are the most likely to get medical care and medicines prescribed for
headaches.
Many people do simply take medicines purchased over
the counter when headache strikes, but in 2002-2003 an annual average of
7.5 million adult Americans age 18 and over purchased prescribed
medicines and/or visited a medical office, hospital outpatient
department, or hospital emergency room to receive treatment for their
headaches, according to data from HHS’ Agency for Healthcare Research
and Quality.
AHRQ’s Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS)
estimates that insurers and patients spent an average total of $4.3
billion per year in 2002- 2003 to pay for prescribed medicines and
ambulatory care to treat headaches.
Roughly 60 percent of the money went to pay for
ambulatory care and 40 percent for prescribed medicines.
Who seeks medical help the most for headache?
Adult women were more than 3 times as likely as
adult men to be treated for a migraine or other headache (5.3 percent
vs. 1.6 percent) and adults in the 45 to 64 age bracket were more likely
to obtain medical care and/or prescribed medicines for headache (4.5
percent ) than younger adults or the elderly age 65 and older, who were
the least likely (1.9 percent).
AHRQ’s other health care data program, the
Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) found that 77,000
Americans were hospitalized for migraine and other headaches in 2003 for
which hospitals charged a total of $813 million. This figure does not
include physician charges since these are billed separately.
About half the patients hospitalized were ages 18
to 44, followed by those in the 45 to 64 age bracket (30 percent). Only
10 percent of admissions were for patients age 65 to 84 and 8 percent
for patients ages 1 through 17.
Roughly 74 percent of patients hospitalized for
migraine or other headache were women and 26 percent men, reflecting a
similar gender difference estimated by MEPS for ambulatory care and
prescribed medicine purchases to treat headaches.
HCUP comprises a family of hospital and other
health care databases and related software tools developed through a
federal-state-industry partnership and sponsored by AHRQ. The hospital
inpatient data on headache was drawn from HCUPnet. To access, this
online statistical tool go to
http://hcup.ahrq.gov/HCUPnet.asp.
MEPS collects information from a nationally
representative sample of U.S. households about health care use,
expenses, access, health status and quality. The survey does not
include people in nursing homes, the military or other institutions. The
data are in Health Service Use and Expenses for Migraines and Other
Headaches, 2002-2003 (Average Annual Estimates), MEPS Statistical Brief
115 at
http://meps.ahrq.gov/papers/st115/stat115.pdf.
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