Economic Burden of Anxiety Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background Anxiety disorders (AD) are common mental disorders, for which several cost-of-illness (COI) studies have been conducted in the past. Objective The aim of this review was to provide a systematic overview of these studies and an aggregation of their results. Methods A systematic literature search limited to studies published after 1999 was conducted in PubMed/MEDLINE in November 2018. We included top-down COI studies reporting costs for AD, and bottom-up COI studies reporting costs for AD and a non-diseased control group, and extracted data manually. Results of the top-down COI studies were aggregated by calculating the mean percentage of costs on gross domestic product (GDP) and health expenditure, while the results of the bottom-up studies were analyzed meta-analytically using the ‘ratio of means’ method and inverse-variance pooling. In this review, the logarithm of the relative difference in a continuous outcome between two groups is calculated and aggregated over the studies. The results can be interpreted as the relative change in costs imposed by a specific disease compared with baseline costs. Results We identified 13 top-down and 11 bottom-up COI studies. All top-down COI studies and four bottom-up COI studies reported costs for AD as a diagnostic group, four for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), four for social anxiety disorder (SAD), and one for panic disorder. In top-down COI studies, direct costs of AD, on average, corresponded to 2.08% of health care costs and 0.22% of GDP, whereas indirect costs, on average, corresponded to 0.23% of GDP. In bottom-up COI studies, direct costs of patients with AD were increased by factor 2.17 (1.29–3.67; p = 0.004) and indirect costs were increased by factor 1.92 (1.05–3.53; p = 0.04), whereas total costs increased by factor 2.52 (1.73–3.68; p