The symptoms of onychomycosis and their impact on personal appearance are important determinants of patients' perceptions of their own health. The effect of onychomycosis is greater on psychosocial than physical functioning and is directly related to the extent of nail involvement. This review...

Although a number of studies have been conducted on health production functions, little attention has been given to pharmaceuticals as a separate input into the production of health. Building upon existing published work, this paper uses an alternative specification and more recent data to...

This study considers an aggregate life expectancy production function for a sample of developed countries. We find that pharmaceutical consumption has a positive effect on life expectancy at middle and advanced ages but is sensitive to the age distribution of a given country. Thus, ignoring age...

The objective of this paper is to examine how well the QALY captures the health gains generated by cancer treatments, with particular focus on the methods for constructing QALYs preferred by the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). Data were obtained using a keyword...

Background It is widely assumed that the principal objective of healthcare is to maximise health. However, people may be willing to sacrifice aggregate health gain in order to direct resources towards those who are worst off in terms of the severity of their pre-treatment health state.Objectives...

A source of debate in the field of health care priority setting is whether health gains should be weighted differently for different groups of patients. The debate has recently focused on the relative value of life extensions for patients with short life expectancy. However, few studies have...

NICE has used its ability to recommend technologies within research programmes, although predominantly within the multiple technology appraisal process. OIR recommendations have been most frequently issued for technologies considered cost ineffective and the most frequently cited consideration...