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IMS Health Estimates Nearly $374 Billion Spent on Drugs Last Year
The study, "Medicine Use and Spending Shifts: A Review of the Use of Medicines in the U.S. in 2014," found that total dollars spent on medications in the country rose 13.1%, up from a 3.2% increase in 2013.
Drug spending in the United States last year was one for the record books. Pharmacists filled a record 4.3 billion prescriptions in 2014 that cost nearly $374 billion, according to a new report issued by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.
“The 13.1% increase in drug spending in 2014 was mainly driven by two things: the availability of new hepatitis C [HCV] treatments and very few products losing patent protection,” said Murray Aitken, IMS Health senior vice president and the executive director of the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. “Sovaldi [sofosbuvir; Gilead] was the biggest drug launch in history.
“As for patent protection, the health system saves money when drugs move from branded products to generics. Typically, there has been a savings of between 15 [billion] and 30 billion a year due to patent expiries. But in 2014, that figure was only $12 billion,” he said.
Read the complete article on PainMedicineNews: http://bit.ly/1EUuScq
Niraparib Extends PFS, Time to Next Treatment in Patients With EOC, Especially BRCA-Mutated Cases
January 28th 2025First-line maintenance (1LM) niraparib significantly extends progression-free survival (rwPFS) and time to next treatment (rwTTNT) in patients with epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC), with the greatest benefit observed in those considered homologous recombination-deficient (HRd) and those with BRCA-mutated (BRCAm) tumors.
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