Non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC) and actinic keratosis are becoming an increasingly important healthcare problem. There are approximately 1 million cases of NMSC in the US each year, primarily basal cell carcinomas, and the incidence is increasing. Although NMSC is significant in terms of both...

Although interferon alpha (IFN) has been approved since 1995 in the US as adjuvant therapy for high-risk melanoma patients, its cost effectiveness and economic value have only been recently addressed. There are very few papers that address the overall cost and cost components of treating...

Background:Background: When guidelines for health economic evaluations prescribe that a societal perspective should be adopted, productivity costs should be included. However, previous research suggests that, in practice, productivity costs are often neglected. This may considerably bias the...

In economic evaluation of healthcare programmes both QOL and productivity of patients are aspects to be studied. Normally, the former is part of the measurement of the effectiveness of the programme and the latter is part of the measurement of its costs. In this paper we highlight the...

Schizophrenia is a disabling, chronic psychiatric disorder that poses numerous challenges in its management and consequences. It extols a significant cost to the patient in terms of personal suffering, on the caregiver as a result of the shift of burden of care from hospital to families, and on...

Background:Background: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease that often results in joint pain, inflammation and bone erosions. Perhaps the most notable change in RA treatment during the last decade is the advent of biologics, and, in particular, anti-tumour necrosis factor...

Background:Background: The indirect costs of Parkinson's disease (PD) may be larger than direct healthcare costs, and the largest component of indirect costs is income loss related to early retirement. No recent retrospective analysis details PD-related early retirement and income loss in the...

A shortcoming of many economic evaluations is that they do not include all medical costs in life-years gained (also termed indirect medical costs). One of the reasons for this is the practical difficulties in the estimation of these costs. While some methods have been proposed to estimate...

The evolution of meningococcal vaccines illustrates nicely the incremental technological process that is common to much medical innovation and particularly appropriate to economic analysis. However, the economic evaluation of vaccines is complicated by several features unique to vaccines,...

Many low- and middle-income countries continue to search for better ways of financing their health systems. Common to many of these systems are problems of inadequate resource mobilisation, as well as inefficient and inequitable use of existing resources. The poor and other vulnerable groups who...