Contemporary Economic, Hospitalization, and Mortality Burden Among Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Patients: A Real-World US Claims Data Analysis.

This study quantified the recent real-world burden of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) using US real-world data. Adults (18+) with treated PAH were identified from the MarketScan Commercial/Medicare Databases using a claims-based algorithm requiring pulmonary hypertension diagnosis, PAH-specific treatment, and right heart catheterization from January 1, 2017 to August 31, 2024 (earliest treatment claim = index). Patients were followed for ≥ 30 days post-index, overall and stratified by payer and by treatment categories. Subsets of PAH-hospitalized and newly treated patients were also analyzed. Measures included demographics, clinical characteristics, all-cause healthcare utilization/costs, PAH-related hospitalization costs/characteristics, and all-cause mortality. Overall, 2712 treated PAH patients were included (mean age 61.8 years, 68.9% female, 57.9% commercial insurance). During mean 2.2 years of follow-up, mean (median) per-patient-per-year all-cause healthcare costs were $302,014 ($210,888) for commercially-insured patients and $200,581 ($147,706) for Medicare patients. Over half (56.2%) of patients had ≥ 1 all-cause hospitalization, 44.9% had ≥ 1 PAH-related hospitalization, and 31.0% were hospitalized for ≥ 1 complication (thrombosis [14.1%], hemorrhage [12.5%], sepsis [14.9%]). Among the PAH-hospitalized subset (