Patients with β-thalassaemia, sickle cell disease (SCD) and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) require chronic blood transfusions, which can lead to iron overload and substantial morbidity and mortality. To reduce the excess iron and its deleterious effects, available iron chelation therapy (ICT)...

Given rising healthcare costs and a growing population of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), there is an urgent need to identify health interventions that provide good value for money. For this review, the English-language literature was searched for studies of interventions in CKD...

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) invited the manufacturer of dronedarone (Multaq, Sanofi-Aventis Limited, UK) to submit evidence on the clinical and cost effectiveness of the anti-arrhythmic drug (AAD) for the treatment of atrial fibrillation (AF) and atrial...

Economic evaluations of health technologies typically assume constant real drug prices and model only the cohort of patients currently eligible for treatment. It has recently been suggested that, in the UK, we should assume that real drug prices decrease at 4% per annum and, in New Zealand, that...

Background: Around 0.4 million cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) occur each year. Only a small fraction of these cases are treated according to international guidelines. Evidence relevant to decisions about whether to scale-up treatment for MDR-TB includes cost and...

Background: The importance of assessing the accuracy of health economic decision models is widely recognized. Many applied decision models (implicitly) assume that the process of identifying relevant values for a model's input parameters is sufficient to prove the model's accuracy. The selection...

There has been a large increase in the incidence of invasive fungal infections (IFIs) over the past decades, largely because of the increasing size of the population at risk. One of the major risk groups for IFIs are patients with haematological malignancies treated with cytotoxic chemotherapy...

Methods for determining sample size requirements for cost-effectiveness studies are reviewed and illustrated. Traditional methods based on tests of hypothesis and power arguments are given for the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio and incremental net benefit (INB). In addition, a full...

Background: Some treatments for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) can reduce exacerbations, and thus could have a favourable impact on overall healthcare costs. Objective: To evaluate a new method for assessing the potential cost savings of COPD controller medications based on the...