Brain disorders represent 35% of the total disease burden in Europe and 37% of the total disease burden in European regions with very low child mortality and low adult mortality; the latter group includes Italy.¹ The negative socioeconomic impact of this burden is reflected in two fundamental issues: consumption of resources and state of health.²

In recent years, the European Brain Council (EBC), a co-ordinating council formed by European organisations in psychiatry, neurology,neurosurgery, basic neuroscience and European patient associations, has encouraged and supported projects aimed at analysing the socioeconomic burden of brain disorders in Europe. These initiatives were ultimately intended to provide recommendations on research, teaching and awareness in public health.

Within the EBC, the pan-European study on Cost of Disorders of the Brain in Europe (CDBE) aimed at reporting the best possible estimates of the cost of 12 brain disorders (addiction, affective disorders, anxiety disorders, tumours, dementia, epilepsy, migraine and other headaches, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, psychotic disorders, stroke and trauma) based on the existing literature, using an ad hoc cost model.³ Other disorders of the brain, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and neuromuscular and developmental disorders, were not included in the CDBE because of heterogeneity or lack of epidemiological and/or cost data.

In the CDBE, costs were assessed under a societal perspective. Included were healthcare costs regardless of who pays (the individual, a private insurer or the public through taxes and social insurance), as well as costs outside the medical sector.

The aggregated results for Italy from the CDBE study have beenpublished elsewhere4 and are reviewed in this article.

Materials and Methods
The methodological bases with regard to the epidemiological analyses and cost studies for this review have been described in detail elsewhere.¹ In brief, data from European cost-of-illness studies were collected. Direct medical and non-medical costs and indirect costs were included in the analysis. Intangible costs (i.e. the economic value of disease-related pain, suffering and loss of quality of life) could not be considered. All economic data were transformed to euros and were referred to 2004. The cost data were expressed in an international measure, the purchasing power parity (€PPP) exchange rate, which allows comparisons of economic data between countries by equalising the purchasing power of different currencies for a given basket of goods.

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