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Economic Cost for Chronic Disease in Canada – 1995-2003

March, 2007

Chronic diseases have serious impacts: they not only cause premature death, but have major adverse effects on the quality of life of affected individuals and create large adverse economic effects on families, communities and societies in general.

As both direct and indirect costs of chronic disease are significantly high, an effective prevention approach can indeed minimize the economic and social burden to the health of society as a whole. The objective of cost of illness studies is to estimate direct cost attributable to illness and indirect costs attributable to productivity and other losses due to morbidity or mortality.

The cost estimates listed in the report are derived from existing data and meta-analyses. No original epidemiologic data were generated for the purpose of this report. The main resources used in this overview and analysis are published reports and government documents that provided costs estimates for specific chronic diseases by a province, or, in some cases, multiple diseases for several provinces.