Background: To meet the challenge of an aging population, providers and payors must optimize chronic wound care outcomes and contain costs. Objective: To explore the costs, outcomes, and effects of outcomes on costs of pressure and venous ulcer woundcare protocols. Design: Modeling study using...

Objective: The objective of this study was to assess the cost effectiveness of using epoetin-alpha (erythropoietin) to augment preoperative autologous donation (PAD) of blood prior to elective cardiac surgery. Design and setting: We designed a decision-analytic model incorporating the risk of...

Cost estimates from developed countries indicate that asthma accounts for up to 2% of the economic cost of all diseases. A large proportion of asthma-related costs are attributable to poor asthma control. Treatment strategies which improve clinical outcomes in patients with asthma, therefore,...

Objective: To assess the cost effectiveness of tapered versus abrupt discontinuation of a microemulsion formulation of cyclosporin in patients with chronic plaque psoriasis. Methods: A cost-effectiveness analysis was performed in parallel with a nonblind, multicentre, international clinical...

Background: There remains uncertainty around the appropriate choice of adjuvant therapies to offer postmenopausal women with node-positive early breast cancer. Objective and study design: To present the results derived from a discrete event simulation (DES) model that compared tamoxifen plus...

The aim of this article is to consider Bayesian and frequentist inference methods for measures of incremental cost effectiveness in data obtained via a clinical trial. The most useful measure is the cost-effectiveness (C/E) acceptability curve. Recent publications on Bayesian estimation have...

Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease of unknown aetiology which affects around 35 000 people in the UK (population 56.8 million). The potential for onset in early adult life, disease chronicity and a need for hospitalisation and surgery mean that the disease can be associated...

Background and objective: Asthma is a chronic-episodic disease characterised by acute, symptomatic episodes of varying severity. We developed a Markov model that can be used to estimate the cost effectiveness of alternative asthma treatments. Because of the costs they incur, asthma exacerbations...

Objective: To compare clinical and economic study data for docetaxel, paclitaxel and vinorelbine in the treatment of anthracycline-resistant advanced breast cancer. Study design and methods: A Markov decision-analysis model to simulate the clinical course of a `typical' patient with advanced...