OBJECTIVES: In recent years, breast cancer remains the leading cause of death in women worldwide.  Evaluating the economic burden of breast cancer is very important due to long-term treatment with expensive drugs and medical services. In Vietnam related studies has not been conducted until now. This is also the aim of this study. METHODS: The cost of breast cancer has been evaluated using pharmacoeconomic method “cost of illness” by  following formula:

COI = DC + IC in which: COI - cost of illness, DC- direct cost, IC- indirect cost A tree-decision model has been developed to evaluate the cost of different stages of breast cancer. This analysis was conducted based on the perspective of health insurance companies, therefore only direct medical costs were evaluated. The price of drugs and medical services have been averaged from the price-list of some major hospitals in Vietnam. The cost of disease for the whole society of Vietnam has been evaluated based on epidemiological data in Vietnam in 2013. RESULTS: The average cost of treatment per year of breast cancer in stage 0- I, II, III, IV accounts for 33,166,886;  287,057,068; 325,116,474 and 153,352,776 VND, respectively. In the structure of average cost with the increasing in severity of disease, the percentage of drug costs increase (from 28.7% in stage 0-I to 95.1% in stage 4) and the percentage of medical services decrease (from 71.3% in stage 0-I to 4.9% in stage 4). The cost of breast cancer for the whole society of Vietnam resulted in around 6,633 billion VND. CONCLUSIONS: The cost of breast cancer increases following the severity level of disease with the increasing percentage of drugs costs and reducing percentage medical services costs. The high cost of breast cancer for the whole society of Vietnam needs to be concerned to conduct the relevant healthcare policies.