Introduction: The Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Lung (FACT-L) is a validated, sensitive and reliable patient questionnaire that evaluates and quantifies quality of life (QOL) across several domains, including lung cancer-related symptoms. The FACT-L was not designed for use in economic...

Background and Objective:Background and Objective: The ability to value health in a way that allows the comparison of different conditions across a range of population groups is central to determining priorities in healthcare. This paper considers some of the concerns with the 'received wisdom'...

Background: Despite great interest in the development of methods used in the economic evaluation of health technologies, the effects of carer costs and quality of life (QOL) on the cost effectiveness of treatments has not been widely explored. Yet carer effects are clearly evident in the...

Objective: To assess both the health-related quality of life (HR-QOL) and the economic value of erythropoietin treatment in chemotherapy-related anaemia using direct utility elicitation and discrete choice experiment (DCE) methods from a societal perspective in the UK. Methods: The time...

Cancer is one of the most frequent disease-specific applications of the EQ-5D. The objective of this review was to summarise evidence to support the validity and reliability of the EQ-5D in cancer, and to provide a catalogue of utility scores based on the use of the EQ-5D in clinical trials and...

This article reviews the general issues in valuing health states for use in cost-effectiveness analysis and the specific issues considered by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in its recent review of the methods of technology appraisal. The general issues are how...

Background and Objective:Background and Objective: For patients with advanced cancers, it is important that treatment improves the quality as well as the quantity of survival. This quality-adjusted time without symptoms of progression or toxicity (Q-TWiST) analysis provides a combined measure of...

Background: Preference-based measures of health (PBMH) provide 'preference' or 'utility' weights that enable the calculation of QALYs for the economic evaluations of interventions. The Diabetes Utility Index (DUI) was developed as a brief, self-administered, diabetes mellitus-specific PBMH that...

Economic evaluations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) incorporate utilities through multi-attribute utility (MAU) measures, most commonly the EQ-5D, to report health-related quality-of-life (HR-QOL) changes or differences. Questions have been raised about the sensitivity of these...

Background: Many clinical trials that generate evidence on the quality-of-life (QOL) improvements provided by new health technologies do not incorporate a preference-based generic measure, but generate only disease-specific data. However, in order to meet the information needs of regulators such...