Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.
Quality-adjusted life-years without constant proportionality. Value in Health Published 27th March 2018
The assumption of constant proportional trade-offs (CPTO) is at the heart of everything we do with QALYs. It assumes that duration has no impact on the value of a given health state, and so the value of a health state is constant regardless of its duration. This assumption has been repeatedly demonstrated to fail. This study looks for a non-constant alternative, which hasn’t been done before. The authors consider a quality-adjusted lifespan and four functional forms for the relationship between time and the value of life: constant, discount, logarithmic, and power. These relationships were tested in an online survey with more than 5,000 people, which involved the completion of 30-40 time trade-off pairs based on the EQ-5D-5L. Respondents traded off health states of varying severities and durations. Initially, a saturated model (making no assumptions about functional form) was estimated. This demonstrated that the marginal value of lifespan is decreasing. The authors provide a set of values attached to different health states at different durations. Then, the econometric model is adjusted to suit a power model, with the power estimated for duration expressed in days, weeks, months, or years. The power value for time is 0.415, but different expressions of time could introduce bias; time expressed in days (power=0.403) loses value faster than time expressed in years (power=0.654). There are also some anomalies that arise from the data that don’t fit the power function. For example, a single day of moderate problems can be worse than death, whereas 7 days or more is not. Using ‘power QALYs’ could be the future. But the big remaining question is whether decisionmakers ought to respond to people’s time preferences in this way.
A systematic review of studies comparing the measurement properties of the three-level and five-level versions of the EQ-5D. PharmacoEconomics [PubMed] Published 23rd March 2018
The debate about the EQ-5D-5L continues (on Twitter, at least). Conveniently, this paper addresses a concern held by some people – that we don’t understand the implications of using the 5L descriptive system. The authors systematically review papers comparing the measurement properties of the 3L and 5L, written in English or German. The review ended up including 24 studies. The measurement properties that were considered by the authors were: i) distributional properties, ii) informativity, iii) inconsistencies, iv) responsiveness, and v) test-retest reliability. The last property involves consideration of index values. Each study was also quality-assessed, with all being considered of good to excellent quality. The studies covered numerous countries and different respondent groups, with sample sizes from the tens to the thousands. For most measurement properties, the findings for the 3L and 5L were very similar. Floor effects were generally below 5% and tended to be slightly reduced for the 5L. In some cases, the 5L was associated with major reductions in the proportion of people responding as 11111 – a well-recognised ceiling effect associated with the 3L. Just over half of the studies reported on informativity using Shannon’s H’ and Shannon’s J’. The 5L provided consistently better results. Only three studies looked at responsiveness, with two slightly favouring the 5L and one favouring the 3L. The latter could be explained by the use of the 3L-5L crosswalk, which is inherently less responsive because it is a crosswalk. The overarching message is consistency. Business as usual. This is important because it means that the 3L and 5L descriptive systems provide comparable results (which is the basis for the argument I recently made that they are measuring the same thing). In some respects, this could be disappointing for 5L proponents because it suggests that the 5L descriptive system is not a lot better than the 3L. But it is a little better. This study demonstrates that there are still uncertainties about the differences between 3L and 5L assessments of health-related quality of life. More comparative studies, of the kind included in this review, should be conducted so that we can better understand the differences in results that are likely to arise now that we have moved (relatively assuredly) towards using the 5L instead of the 3L.
Preference-based measures to obtain health state utility values for use in economic evaluations with child-based populations: a review and UK-based focus group assessment of patient and parent choices. Quality of Life Research [PubMed] Published 21st March 2018
Calculating QALYs for kids continues to be a challenge. One of the challenges is the choice of which preference-based measure to use. Part of the problem here is that the EuroQol group – on which we rely for measuring adult health preferences – has been a bit slow. There’s the EQ-5D-Y, which has been around for a while, but it wasn’t developed with any serious thought about what kids value and there still isn’t a value set for the UK. So, if we use anything, we use a variety of measures. In this study, the authors review the use of generic preference-based measures. 45 papers are identified, including 5 different measures: HUI2, HUI3, CHU-9D, EQ-5D-Y, and AQOL-6D. No prizes for guessing that the EQ-5D (adult version) was the most commonly used measure for child-based populations. Unfortunately, the review is a bit of a disappointment. And I’m not just saying that because at least one study on which I’ve worked isn’t cited. The search strategy is likely to miss many (perhaps most) trial-based economic evaluations with children, for which cost-utility analyses don’t usually get a lot of airtime. It’s hard to see how a review of this kind is useful if it isn’t comprehensive. But the goal of the paper isn’t just to summarise the use of measures to date. The focus is on understanding when researchers should use self- or proxy-response, and when a parent-child dyad might be most useful. The literature review can’t do much to guide that question except to assert that the identified studies tended to use parent–proxy respondents. But the study also reports on some focus groups, which are potentially more useful. These were conducted as part of a wider study relating to the design of an RCT. In five focus groups, participants were presented with the EQ-5D-Y and the CHU-9D. It isn’t clear why these two measures were selected. The focus groups included parents and some children over the age of 11. Unfortunately, there’s no real (qualitative) analysis conducted, so the findings are limited. Parents expressed concern about a lack of sensitivity. Naturally, they thought that they knew best and should be the respondents. Of the young people reviewing the measures themselves, the EQ-5D-Y was perceived as more straightforward in referring to tangible experiences, whereas the CHU-9D’s severity levels were seen as more representative. Older adolescents tended to prefer the CHU-9D. The youths weren’t so sure of themselves as the adults and, though they expressed concern about their parents not understanding how they feel, they were generally neutral to who ought to respond. The older kids wanted to speak for themselves. The paper provides a good overview of the different measures, which could be useful for researchers planning data collection for child health utility measurement. But due to the limitations of the review and the lack of analysis of the focus groups, the paper isn’t able to provide any real guidance.
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