Background: Clinical studies have demonstrated that esomeprazole is superior to omeprazole for the acute treatment of reflux oesophagitis. Objective: To compare the cost effectiveness of esomeprazole 40mg once daily with omeprazole 20mg once daily in patients with reflux oesophagitis. Methods:...

Background: The Fracture Intervention Trial (FIT) demonstrated that the bisphosphonate alendronate reduces the risk of hip, spine and wrist fracture in osteoporotic women by approximately one half. Objective: To use data from FIT to conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis of alendronate. Design: A...

Objective: To estimate the short term and long term cost effectiveness, from a healthcare perspective, associated with the introduction of lamivudine for chronic hepatitis B. Design: The analysis used a 2-step modelling approach. A decision tree was used to estimate clinical outcomes and costs...

Objective: The objective of this study was to assess the cost effectiveness of using epoetin-alpha (erythropoietin) to augment preoperative autologous donation (PAD) of blood prior to elective cardiac surgery. Design and setting: We designed a decision-analytic model incorporating the risk of...

Cost estimates from developed countries indicate that asthma accounts for up to 2% of the economic cost of all diseases. A large proportion of asthma-related costs are attributable to poor asthma control. Treatment strategies which improve clinical outcomes in patients with asthma, therefore,...

Objective: To assess the cost effectiveness of tapered versus abrupt discontinuation of a microemulsion formulation of cyclosporin in patients with chronic plaque psoriasis. Methods: A cost-effectiveness analysis was performed in parallel with a nonblind, multicentre, international clinical...

Background: There remains uncertainty around the appropriate choice of adjuvant therapies to offer postmenopausal women with node-positive early breast cancer. Objective and study design: To present the results derived from a discrete event simulation (DES) model that compared tamoxifen plus...

The aim of this article is to consider Bayesian and frequentist inference methods for measures of incremental cost effectiveness in data obtained via a clinical trial. The most useful measure is the cost-effectiveness (C/E) acceptability curve. Recent publications on Bayesian estimation have...

Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease of unknown aetiology which affects around 35 000 people in the UK (population 56.8 million). The potential for onset in early adult life, disease chronicity and a need for hospitalisation and surgery mean that the disease can be associated...