Annual Drug Costs per Patient for Existing Alzheimer’s Disease Treatment Drugs, and Drugs with Annual Costs of ¥3 Million or More per Patient

The Central Social Insurance Medical Council (中医協) approved the inclusion of the new Alzheimer’s disease treatment drug, “Lecanemab” (product name: Leqembi), in public medical insurance last month (December 2023). The official price (drug price) is ¥2,980,000 per person per year for an individual weighing 50 kilograms.

For the period from April 2022 to March 2023, the annual drug costs (at full NHI price level) per patient prescribed with any of the existing Alzheimer’s disease treatment drugs for G30 Alzheimer’s disease were calculated based on MDV data. The prescribed drugs include Galantamine hydrobromide, Donepezil hydrochloride, Memantine hydrochloride, and Rivastigmine.

For the period from April 2022 to March 2023, data was collected from 411 target medical facilities.

Reference Information: AnswersNews – Release of Alzheimer’s Disease Treatment Drug ‘Rekenbi,’ How Eisai Plans to Expand the Market (Including Data on the Trend of Prescription Numbers for Dementia Treatment Drugs Provided by Our Company)

During the same period, a list of drugs (ATC5 code) exceeding ¥3 million in cost per patient and the number of drugs within each ATC5 code surpassing ¥3 million per patient per year were examined. Notably, drugs for cancer, hemophilia A, hemophilia B, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune diseases, and C-type hepatitis emerged as the top categories.

For the period from April 2022 to March 2023, data was collected from 411 target medical facilities. Please note that this information is based on a one-year snapshot and does not represent observations over the entire year from the initiation of drug use and includes patients who started before the period and patients who started in the middle of the period. Additionally, high-cost rare diseases with fewer than 100 actual patients were excluded from the analysis.

Note: This article was published on January 1, 2024.