We performed a 1-year cluster-randomized field trial to assess the effect of standardized management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) on lung function and quality of life (QOL) measures in patients in China. We used the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) treatment guidelines and assessed indexes including pulmonary function, QOL, quality-adjusted life y...

Background and aims Lung cancer has the highest mortality rate of all cancers worldwide. Non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for 85% of all lung cancers and has an extremely poor prognosis. Afatinib is an irreversible ErbB family blocker designed to suppress cellular signaling and inhibit cellular growth and is approved in Europe after platinum-based therapy for squamous NSCLC. The obje...

INTRODUCTION Chronic asthma is a significant burden for individual sufferers, adversely impacting their quality of working and social life, as well as being a major cost to the National Health Service (NHS). Temperature-controlled laminar airflow (TLA) therapy provides asthma patients at BTS/SIGN step 4/5 an add-on treatment option that is non-invasive and has been shown in clinical studies to ...

This paper argues that the Quality Adjusted Life Year or QALY is fatally flawed as a way of priority setting in health care and of dealing with the problem of scarce resources. In addition to showing why this is so the paper sets out a view of the moral constraints that govern the allocation of health resources and suggests reasons for a new attitude to the health budget.

The goal of a therapeutic HIV vaccine is to attenuate HIV disease progression in those already infected. Our objective was to establish comparative efficacy and cost-effectiveness thresholds at which a therapeutic vaccine would make a valuable contribution to HIV care. Using an HIV computer simulation model, we compared therapeutic vaccination with HIV standard of care without vaccination. Inpu...

Introduction The Spanish Ministry of Health asked us about the efficiency extending current rotavirus vaccination strategy to all newborns. is vaccinate only high-risk newborns (premature and those qualified as by a pediatrician). objective this research was compare three strategies: no-vaccination, universal vaccination, considering two vaccines available in Spain: RotaTeq® Rotarix®. Methods A...

The QALY (quality-adjusted life years) attempts to incorporate the dimension of quality of life into the evaluation by adjusting life years by a quality factor. In practice, this is based on discussing with people the progression of a number of hypothetical illnesses and their ensuing side effects. From this information, the person assesses how each state of health described compares with a the...

Cost-effectiveness analysis made its first appearance in the health care literature more than 4 decades ago. In Britain, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) explicitly considers cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) gained among its criteria for coverage recommendations to the National Health Service; some observers have inferred that explicit criteria such as £30,000 per ...

The quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is routinely used as a summary measure of health outcome for economic evaluation, which incorporates the impact on both the quantity and quality of life. Key studies relating to the QALY and utility measurement are the sources of data. Areas of agreement include the need for a standard measure of health outcome to enable comparisons across different disease...

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE: The intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) has been established as the standard external-beam radiation technique to treat prostate cancer in several countries. In Brazil, public health system and National Health Agency do not reimburse its utilization. This study compared cost-effectiveness of IMRT tridimensional (3D-RT) from a payer’s perspective. METHODS: We built Markov ...