Abstract
Stroke units (SUs), which have been established over the past few years, are useful for achieving good clinical results and medical economy for stroke patients. We also established an SU in 1996 in cooperation with our neurosurgical department. Although, economic studies on surgery of intracranial aneurysms have considered the significant benefit of a surgical approach to unruptured aneurysms, no studies have been performed to analyze the cost of ruptured aneurysms.
We retrospectively conducted the present study to verify whether the SU has a benefit in terms of cost and patient's outcome. We compared a control (C) group with an SU group in terms of length of time waiting for rehabilitation after admission, the length of stay in hospital and patients' outcome at discharge. The C group comprised 48 ruptured aneurysmal patients who were treated from 1993 to 1995. The SU group comprised 45 patients treated from 1996 to 1998. The SU shortened the length of stay in hospital about 30 days with the same outcome compared with the C group. We calculated in each group the direct cost of hospitalization and the rehabilitation cost during their stay in hospital. The total cost in the SU group was about 500,000 yen less than that of the C group.
The SU helps achieve good clinical results and medical economy even for patients with ruptured aneurysms.
