In the United States, an estimated $1 billion annually is spent on vascular access and its complications. Endovascular arteriovenous fistula (endoAVF) creation a novel, minimally invasive alternative to traditional surgical AVF (sAVF) in up 60% of patients. Although cost effective single-payer systems, clinical financial impact endoAVF States remains uncertain. We constructed decision tree foll...

Health risks are commonly quantified using either of two alternative measures, willingness to pay (WTP) and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). The relationship between these measures is of interest for comparing benefit-cost analysis (which uses WTP) with cost-effectiveness analysis (which uses QALYs), identifying a threshold for determining which health interventions are cost-effective, and ...

BACKGROUND Early living-donor transplantation improves patient- and graft-survival compared with possible cadaveric renal transplantation (RTx), but the magnitude of the survival gain is unknown. For patients starting renal replacement therapy (RRT), we aimed to quantify the survival benefit of early living-donor transplantation compared with dialysis and possible cadaveric transplantation and ...

OBJECTIVE Evaluate the cost effectiveness of losartan compared with atenolol from a Swedish national health system perspective. DESIGN The Losartan Intervention For Endpoint reduction in hypertension study (LIFE) was a double-masked, randomized trial of losartan versus atenolol in 9193 patients with essential hypertension and left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) ascertained by electrocardiograp...

BACKGROUND In 2012, CDC launched the first federally funded national mass media antismoking campaign. The Tips From Former Smokers (Tips) campaign resulted in a 12% relative increase in population-level quit attempts. PURPOSE Cost-effectiveness analysis was conducted in 2013 to evaluate Tips from a funding agency's perspective. METHODS Estimates of sustained cessations; premature deaths ave...

Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are used to determine how to allocate resources to health programmes or to treatments within those programmes in order to gain maximum utility from those limited, shared healthcare resources. However, if we use those same population- based QALYs when faced with individual treatment decisions we may act unjustly in relation to that individual or in relation to...

PURPOSE The genetic polymorphism was one of the major considerations for adjusting doses of warfarin in Thai individuals. As a result, new oral anticoagulants (NOACs) were introduced to achieve therapeutic goals in stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation (SPAF) patients. However, a cost-utility analysis in a population-specific model was lacking in Thailand. This study was performed to determi...