The Relationship between Lifestyle and Costs Related to Medicine Use in Adults

BACKGROUND: The unhealthy lifestyle is growing and this can have repercussions on health status demanding actions on the occurrence of diseases and leads to increased expenses. OBJECTIVE: To examine the interrelationship between the costs of medicine use and lifestyle behaviors. METHODS: A cohort study with 118 participants, age around 51.7 ± 7.1 years old. It was collected personal and anthropometric data and information about medicine of continuous use to calculate the costs. Lifestyle variables included habitual physical activity (PA) assessed by pedometer, sedentary behavior by Baecke questionnaire, sleep quality by mini sleep questionnaire and self-report of smoke and alcohol consumption. Statistical analyses were performed by BioEstat (version 5.2) and the significance level set at p-value < 0.05. RESULTS: In 12 months, 62 subjects bought 172 medicines, representing an overall cost of US$ 3,087.01. Expenditures with drugs were negatively related to PA (r = -0.194, p-value = 0.035 and r = -0.281, p-value = 0.002), but positively related with sleep quality (r = 0.299, p-value=0.001 and r = 0.315, p-value = 0.001) and age (r = 0.274, p-value = 0.003). Four multivariate models were executed considering lifestyle behaviors in different moments of cohort and medicine costs, and all these models identify important relationship between lifestyle behaviors with expenditures with drugs. CONCLUSION: Worse sleep quality seems to increase the costs related to medicine use in adults, while obesity and ageing play a relevant role in this phenomenon and alcohol consumption seems a variable with relevant economic impact.