With the need for healthcare cost-containment, increased scrutiny will be placed on new medical therapeutic or diagnostic technologies. Several challenges exist for a new diagnostic test to demonstrate cost-effectiveness. New diagnostic tests differ from therapeutic procedures due to the fact that diagnostic tests do not generally directly affect long-term patient outcomes. Instead, the results...

BACKGROUND Bronchoscopic procedures are common in the clinical setting, with estimates indicating 500,000 are undertaken per year in the USA alone. These procedures are generally regarded as safe. Unfortunately, a risk of cross-contamination between patients, with possible subsequent infection, is associated with the re-usable technology typically used in these procedures. OBJECTIVE Our objec...

We explored the prognostic significance of the pre-operative-to-post-operative serum carcinoembryonic antigen (pre-post-CEA) ratio in colorectal cancer (CRC). We detected pre- and post-operative CEA levels in 2035 CRC patients surgically treated at First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University between June 2001 and June 2011. Univariate analysis revealed the pre-post-CEA ratio is associated...

A small percentage (15%) of particles morphologically distinct from carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) cruller-like particles (averaging 9 x 40 nm) as determined by electron microscopy, and previously presumed to be impurities, has been removed from CEA preparations by concanavalin A (Con A) affinity chromatography. The first of four affinity fractions constituted 45% of the recovered weight; the l...

Cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) of behavioral interventions typically use physical outcome criteria. However, any progress in cognitive antecedents of behavior change may be seen as a beneficial outcome of an intervention. The aim of this study is to explore the feasibility and validity of incorporating cognitive parameters of behavior change in CEAs. The CEA from a randomized controlled tri...

Objective Treatment options for metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) have expanded rapidly in recent years. Given the significant economic burden, we sought perform a cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of the contemporary treatment paradigm for mCRPC. Methods We devised a treatment protocol consisting of sipuleucel-T, enzalutamide, abiraterone, docetaxel, radium-223, and cab...

CEA is a tool that has seen increasing use in recent decades as decision makers at all levels of health care provision seek to value alternative interventions (or programs, tests, or treatments). Although CEAs can be complex, and are often described using somewhat arcane terminology, the concept at the core of any CEA is fairly simple: to combine the net cost of a given intervention and its out...

BACKGROUND Cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) that use patient-specific data from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) are popular, yet such CEAs are criticized because they neglect to incorporate evidence external to the trial. A popular method for quantifying uncertainty in a RCT-based CEA is the bootstrap. The objective of the present study was to further expand the bootstrap method of RCT-ba...

OBJECTIVE The role of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) in incentivizing innovation is controversial. Critics of CEA argue that its use for pricing purposes disregards the 'value of innovation' reflected in new drug development, whereas supporters of CEA highlight that the value of innovation is already accounted for. Our objective in this article is to outline the limitations of the convention...

Background: Carcinoembryonic antigen cell adhesion molecule (CEA) is a commonly immunohistochemically used antibody in pathological routine diagnostics with an overexpression in different cancers. We aimed to examine the immunohistochemically detectable CEA level in ampullary cancer and to correlate it with clinico-pathological data. Methods: Shot-gun proteomics revealed CEA in undifferentiated...