The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) responds to requests by the Department of Health for guidance on the use of selected new and established technologies in the National Health Service (NHS) in England and Wales. This paper asks whether the NICE methodological guidelines help...

The resources available for healthcare are limited compared with demand, if not need, and all healthcare systems, regardless of their financing and organisation, employ mechanisms to ration or prioritise finite healthcare resources. This paper reviews alternative approaches that can be used to...

Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) are regularly used in health economics to elicit preferences for healthcare products and programmes. There is growing recognition that DCEs can provide more than information on preferences and, in particular, they have the potential to contribute more directly...

Background: Natalizumab (Tysabri(R)) is a new disease-modifying therapy that has been shown to be clinically effective in patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) and has been licensed for use in patients with highly active RRMS (HARRMS). These patients are those who...

This review of published studies on the costs of HIV treatment and care describes some of the recent developments that have influenced these costs in industrialised and industrialising countries, especially within the context of changing drug treatments. Some of the different approaches to...

Patients with angina pectoris have a reduced quality of life because of their symptoms, impaired activity and anxiety. However, there is no consensus on the best method of measuring quality of life. A systematic literature search of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in angina showed that the...