The typical HD patient interviewed was an adult woman in a parental role who lived in the capital city of Lima. Higher prevalence of HD in Peruvian women was also found by Cornejo-Olivas et al. (2015) [10]. However, the relative higher frequency of female on the HD cohort we followed might do not reflect a real difference in HD population in Peru, and would be mostly related to demographic characteristics of outpatient HD population followed at the NRC, with less patients very ill and milder forms of HD. One of the characteristics of HD is that it appears when patients have already formed a family and have offspring [2, 3]. The mean age at onset in our population is consistent with classical reports among the majority of other worldwide HD cohorts previously reported on [28, 29]. Furthermore, the high percentage of our population reporting official residence in Lima is likely related to the fact that the NRC-INCN is the national referral center for HD in the public healthcare system [30].
According to our results, HD patients seemed to be affiliated with any health insurance in a lower proportion than the rest of Peruvian population. Therefore, they could be considered as a highly vulnerable group. Among patients working at the time of the interview, more than 76% declared their job as informal, which means that they did not have any work-associated benefits like health insurance coverage or a retirement pension. It may seem paradoxical that patients with Barthel 1, 2 or 3 in our cohort had, on average, similar salary losses than more independent patients (Barthel 4 or 5). This particular finding might be related to the fact that patients with higher disability might have lost their jobs a long time before the interview. Also, this result may be due to a sample bias, since the Barthel 1 category comprises a very small number of patients.
Up to 69% of the interviewed patients had a parental role and their HD status affected their ability to contribute to home expenses. The diagnosis of HD in one family member triggers many changes at home, often forcing another family member to take over the role of the person diagnosed with HD [31, 32]. Moreover, most patients need some kind of assistance to develop basic or instrumental activities of daily living, also leading to those closer relatives becoming the primary caregivers since the public social services network in Peru is virtually non-existent. Also, the cost of professional caregivers providing continued formal care is out of reach of most Peruvians and, in particular, of the patients in our sample, which explains that this kind of care was not reported. As was described in the results’ section, informal caregiving tends to increase with patients’ level of dependency. It is worth noting, however, that the total cost of informal caregiving services is higher in the Barthel 2 group (severe dependency) as compared with the Barthel 1 group (total dependency). This is related to the fact that most disabled HD patients are usually mute and confined to bed, thus requiring fewer hours of assistance in activities of daily living in comparison with those HD patients who are still walking.
The high percentage of informal caregiving costs shown in our study exceeds the one obtained in a United Kingdom study of a parallel HD cohort performed by Jones et al. [18], in which informal care of HD accounted for 65% of total costs. This fact may be related to the reduced size of the market of formal care in Peru. It also has to be highlightened that HD progressively generates motor disfunction (difficulties for walking, writing, dressing, feeding), cognitive (executive dysfunction, learning disability, memory loss, planning difficulties) and behavioral disturbances (apathy, hallucinations, depression, obsessive-compulsive behavior, suicidal behavior) [33]. Cost studies for Alzheimer’s Disease and other diseases causing severe dependency for activities of daily living also reported comparable results [23, 34].
By contrast, healthcare costs represented only 7.3% of total costs. The average cost reached USD 590 in 2015, almost twice the total health care expenditure per inhabitant in Peru in the same year (USD 314) [35]. As anticipated, healthcare costs increased in parallel with increases in patient dependency, in line with previous literature [17]. With regard to medical visits, most of our patients only reported follow-up visits with neurology/neurogenetics, contrasting with national and international HD guidelines. These guidelines recommend an integral healthcare strategy for HD patients that includes, in conjunction with symptomatic pharmacological therapies, regular visits to neurologists, geneticists, psychiatrists/psychologists, endocrinologists, gastroenterologists, nutritionists, rehabilitation specialists and general practitioners, among others [36, 37].
Almost all interviewed patients had to finance healthcare costs out-of-pocket, despite most of them technically being enrolled in some form of public health insurance. It is worth noting that INCN is the usual provider of healthcare services for HD patients, and that these services may only be provided for free to those citizens who are covered by the SIS (integral health insurance). Even so, patients are forced to deal with the bureaucracy of SIS, which requires extensive referral documentation and additional paperwork to be completed beforehand, and also leads to months-long waits for reimbursements. Since most patients opted to finance healthcare costs out-of-pocket and did not pursue SIS reimbursement given logistical constraints, it is reasonable to assume that they only could afford high priority drugs and medical visits. This fact could explain the large proportion of reported neurology follow-up visits versus visits to other physicians.
Our study has a number of limitations. Firstly, it is possible that a certain number of HD patients residing in provinces with challenging environments, such as the highlands or jungle, have limited access to molecular diagnosis due to geographical barriers, which would thus contribute to sample bias. Nevertheless, as was shown in the results’ section, there is a reasonable geographic spread in our sample. Secondly, since the use of health services depends mostly on the spending capacity of patients and their families rather than on optimal healthcare requirements, healthcare costs will be underestimated relative to what appropriate treatment would require. Thirdly, we cannot provide a sensitivity test for our estimations of informal care costs by using an opportunity cost method, since socio-demographic and labour status data were only collected for the main caregiver. Finally, external validity of our study may also be limited as our sample derives from a population registered in the NRC-INCN, which does not necessarily represent the entirety of the Peruvian HD population. However, since the NRC-INCN is the only national reference center for molecular diagnosis of HD in the public system, almost every Peruvian patient with a clinical suspicion for HD is referred to this center in order to determine a definitive diagnosis.
