Cannabis Cost-Effective for Treatment of Painful Neuropathy

A poster presented at the AAPM 2018 Annual Meeting found that smoked cannabis is a cost-effective treatment for pain related to diabetic neuropathy when added to second- and third-line treatments.

“A recent meta-analysis demonstrated the benefit of medicinal cannabis for neuropathic pain,” David J Grelotti, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues wrote. “[Our study] is an exploratory cost-effectiveness analysis of adjunctive cannabis for painful diabetic neuropathy.”

The researchers used statistical analysis to compare traditional therapies for painful diabetic neuropathy. They created a model that tested first-line therapies; and second-line and third-line therapies if first-line therapies failed. The model compared costs and effectiveness of standard therapy with and without cannabis among 1,000,000 simulated patients with painful diabetic neuropathy.

Study results showed that cannabis was less effective and less cost-effective when added as a first-line therapy compared with adding cannabis as second- and third-line therapy. They found that second- and third-line cannabis therapy was more effective, but costlier than conventional therapy. However, they also found that adding cannabis to second- and third-line therapy demonstrated favorable cost-effectiveness thresholds at $30,743 per QALY and $29,927 per QALY, respectively.

“Cannabis is cost-effective when added to second- and third-line treatments for painful diabetic neuropathy,” the researchers concluded. “As market cannabis prices are highly variable in practice, further research is warranted to explore the benefit and workability of concentration-standardized cannabis in painful diabetic neuropathy.”

—David Costill