ArticleJournal of vascular surgery2025
Out-of-pocket health care spending among patients with acute limb ischemia stratified by income.
Article in Journal of vascular surgery, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveAcute limb ischemia (ALI) results in high health care costs due to the near-universal need for surgical procedures and long hospital stays. Beyond the system costs incurred due to ALI, out-of-pocket (OOP) costs have a significant impact on patients' well-being and compliance with care. The objective of this study was to quantify OOP costs among individuals with ALI compared with the general population.
methodsThis was a cross-sectional study of individuals aged 18 years or older in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) from 2017 to 2021. The primary exposure was ALI, which was determined by MEPS clinical classification codes. The cohort of patients with ALI was compared against a population without pre-determined common and significant chronic comorbidities. The primary endpoints for comparison were adjusted OOP spending and rates of catastrophic health spending (CHS). Analyses were also conducted with the cohort stratified by income quartile.
resultsA total of 2,172,062 weighted individuals with ALI were compared with 148,665,584 weighted individuals in the general population free of significant chronic disease. Individuals with ALI had significantly higher average annual OOP healthcare spending than the general population ($1992 vs $1013; β = 554.85; P = .001), which was driven by higher spending on inpatient hospitalizations ($140 vs $47; P < .001), prescription medications ($520 vs $158; P < .001), and other non-specified costs ($229 vs $48; P < .001). When stratifying by income quartile (low, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high income), the lower-middle income quartile (near-poor) had a CHS rate of 5.4%, compared with 0.1% to 1.1% in all other quartiles. Individuals with ALI had significantly higher rates of CHS in the lower-middle (13.9% vs 5.3%; P < .001) and upper-middle (3.1% vs 0.6%; P < .001) income quartiles, but not in the low (1.3% vs 1.0%; P = .719) or high (0.0% vs 0.1%; P = .695) income quartiles.
conclusionsIndividuals with ALI and near-poor individuals are especially vulnerable to high OOP health care spending. Efforts aimed at reducing hospital length of stay and reducing medication costs could reduce OOP spending among patients with ALI. Further, policy reform to expand insurance coverage among the near-poor group or implementation of means-based OOP spending limits could significantly mitigate the vulnerability of this group.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.