Although interferon alpha (IFN) has been approved since 1995 in the US as adjuvant therapy for high-risk melanoma patients, its cost effectiveness and economic value have only been recently addressed. There are very few papers that address the overall cost and cost components of treating...

The principal aim of this article is to share lessons learned by the authors while conducting economic evaluations, using clinical trial data, of mental health interventions. These lessons are quite general and have clear relevance for pharmacoeconomic studies. In addition, we explore how net...

Researchers must often make assumptions about the efficacy of an intervention in a target population without the benefit of trial data specific to that population. Such assumptions may be particularly tenuous with models of vaccination strategies, since the distribution of pathogen strains in...

Objective: The CARDS trial, a multicentre, randomized, controlled trial, found that atorvastatin 10 mg/day for patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and normal low-density lipoprotein (LDL)-cholesterol significantly reduced cardiovascular (CV) events, including stroke. We estimated the cost...

Background: Instruments that measure the impact of illness on work do not usually provide a measure that can be directly translated into lost hours or costs. We describe the validation of the Work and Health Interview (WHI), a questionnaire that provides a measure of lost productive time (LPT)...

Hepatitis A vaccines have been available for more than a decade. Because the burden of hepatitis A virus has fallen in developed countries, the appropriate role of vaccination programmes, especially universal vaccination strategies, remains unclear. Cost-effectiveness analysis is a useful method...

The cost effectiveness of early treatment with lisinopril in acute myocardial infarction (MI) was estimated using survival and cost data gathered prospectively during the hospitalisation of the overall population of patients enrolled in the third study of the Gruppo Italiano per lo Studio della...

Objective: To compare the healthcare costs and effects of budesonide/formoterol in a single inhaler with those of budesonide and formoterol monotherapies, and placebo, in a multinational study in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute...

Since 1999, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Technology Appraisal Programme has been charged with producing guidance for the NHS in England and Wales on the appropriate use of new and existing healthcare programmes. Guidance is based on an assessment of a number...

Background: In the Treatment with Ibutilide and Magnesium Evaluation (TIME) study, a retrospective multicentre cohort trial, prophylactic magnesium was found to improve the antiarrhythmic efficacy of ibutilide as demonstrated by an increase in the rate of successful chemical conversion and...