Chronic disease and economics

Chronic diseases are long-term conditions, with Donoso (2023) noting not only that ‘around 50% of people follow long-term treatment recommendations in high-income countries and presumably even less in low-income and middle-income countries’, but also that living with chronic disease requires effort to remember that symptoms can improve when individuals feel unwell and can return when they feel better.

Given this bleak context, one might speculate on how those suffering from chronic diseases might have reacted to a news item from Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC). It revealed that in, April 2018, Salveen Richter, an analyst from financial services company Goldman Sachs, in a report titled The Genome Revolution, asked, ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ (CNBC, 2018). Ms Richter further opined that ‘one-shot cures’ like gene therapy ‘offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies.’