Investigation of the Effect of Aging on Health Costs: A Systematic Review

Aging and the need for more health care in the elderly population have incurred large expenditures. Based on the importance of the aging population phenomenon and the increase in lifetime in recent decades, this study aimed to systematically review the studies on costs of elderly health care.

In this systematic review, the articles published in PubMed, Google Scholar, Science Direct, Scopus, and Ovid Medline databases from 2000 to 2017 were derived using a systematic search strategy.

The results of the reviewed studies showed that by increasing the consumption of long-term care and home care, the costs would increase and by reducing the consumption of acute hospital care, such costs would decrease. Based on the results, the average cost of elderly health care in the reviewed studies was 48101 US dollars in 2015. Moreover, the highest average costs were for inpatient services (19003US dollars) and long-term care and home care (12583US dollars).  

Considering the high costs of hospitalization of the elderly, measures like establishment of day care centers and home care instead of hospitalization should be taken into consideration in the elderly health care programs to reduce the number of hospitalizations.