ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Pediatr.
Sec. Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fped.2025.1622205
The Healthcare Burden Imposed by Children with Gastroparesis and the Shift Imposed by COVID-19
Provisionally accepted
- 1Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, United States
- 2Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
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We aim in this study to report the trend of annual economic burden of children admitted with Gastroparesis (GP) over the last 10 years and evaluate the possible effect of COVID-19.Background: Inpatient healthcare utilization by children with GP was last reported between 2004-2013. Since then, the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has not been evaluated.We used the Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS) database to retrieve data recorded in 42 children's hospitals between January 2014 and September 2023 with GP being a primary or secondary diagnosis.Results: A total of 20293 pediatric gastroparesis admissions were documented. The total cost was $1,323,541,518. The average admission cost was $65,222 and the median was $18,921. Reviewing the possible effect of COVID-19, we found that the highest annual mean and median costs were in 2020, and the highest annual total cost was in 2022.The costs are divided over 6 different categories: clinical, imaging, lab, pharmacy, supplies, and others, with the highest impacts resulting from these 3 categories: clinical, pharmacy, and others. The mean and median costs differ in the 4 regions, Northeast, South, Midwest and West, with the highest in the Midwest.Of all the admissions, 15.6% had a code for nasogastric tube (NG) present, 40.7% used the code for a gastrostomy tube (G-tube), 10.0% had a code for a jejunostomy tube (J-tube) and 24.6% required nutrition support via surgical feeding tubes.This PHIS database study confirms an upward trend in the annual healthcare utilization by children admitted with GP, resulting in an upward trend in the total economic burden on children's hospitals emphasized by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Keywords: Gastroparesis, cost, healthcare utilization, category, Region, Feeding supplementation, Functional Gastrointestinal Disorder, disorders of the gut-brain interaction
Received: 02 May 2025; Accepted: 07 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sadaka, Xu, Benitez, Orians, Pearlstein and Mousa. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Christian Sadaka, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, United States
Hayat Mousa, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, United States
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