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.
A Randomized Trial of Epinephrine in Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest. New England Journal of Medicine. Published July 2018.
Adrenaline (epinephrine) is often administered to patients in cardiac arrest in order to increase blood flow and improve heart rhythm. However, there had been some concern about the potential adverse effects of using adrenaline, and a placebo controlled trial was called for. This article presents the findings of this trial. While there is little economics in this article, it is an interesting example of what I believe to be erroneous causal thinking, especially in the way it was reported in the media. For example, The Guardian‘s headline was,
Routine treatment for cardiac arrest doubles risk of brain damage – study
while The Telegraph went for the even more inflammatory
Cardiac arrest resuscitation drug has needlessly brain-damaged thousands
But what did the study itself say about their findings:
the use of epinephrine during resuscitation for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest resulted in a significantly higher rate of survival at 30 days than the use of placebo. […] although the rate of survival was slightly better, the trial did not show evidence of a between-group difference in the rate of survival with a favorable neurologic outcome. This result was explained by a higher proportion of patients who survived with severe neurologic disability in the epinephrine group.
Clearly, a slightly more nuanced view, but nevertheless it leaves room for the implication that the adrenaline is causing the neurological damage. Indeed the authors go on to say that “the use of epinephrine did not improve neurologic outcome.” But a counterfactual view of causation should lead us to ask what would have happened to those who survived with brain damage had they not been given adrenaline.
We have a competing risks set up: (A) survival with favourable neurologic outcome, (B) survival with neurologic impairment, and (C) death. The proportion of patients with outcome (A) was slightly higher in the adrenaline group (although not statistically significant so apparently no effect eyes roll), the proportion of patients with outcome (B) was a lot higher in the adrenaline group, and the proportion of patients with outcome (C) was lower in the adrenaline group. This all suggests to me that the adrenaline caused patients who would have otherwise died to mostly survive with brain damage, and a few to survive impairment free, not that adrenaline caused those who would have otherwise been fine to have brain damage. So the question in response to the above quotes is then, is death a preferable neurologic outcome to brain damage? As trite as this may sound, it is a key health economics question – how do we value these health states?
Incentivizing Safer Sexual Behavior: Evidence from a Lottery Experiment on HIV Prevention. American Economic Review: Applied Economics. [RePEc] Published July 2018.
This article presents a randomised trial testing an interesting idea. People who are at high risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and often those who engage in riskier sexual behaviour. A basic decision theoretic conception would be that those individuals don’t consider the costs to be high enough relative to the benefits (although there is clearly some divide between this explanation and how people actually think in terms of risky sexual behaviour, much like any other seemingly irrational behaviour). Conditional cash transfers can change the balance of the decision to incentivise people to act differently, what this study looks at is using a conditional lottery with the chance of high winnings instead, since this should be more attractive still to risk-seeking individuals. While the trial was designed to reduce HIV prevalance, entry into the lottery in the treatment arm was conditional on being free of two curable STIs at each round – this enabled people who fail to be eligible again, and also allowed the entry of HIV-positive individuals whose sexual behaviour is perhaps the most important to reducing HIV transmission. The lottery arm of the trial was found to have 20% lower incidence over the study period compared to the control arm – quite impressive. However, the cost-effectiveness of the program was estimated to be $882 per HIV infection averted on the basis of lottery payments alone, and around $3,300 per case averted all in. This seems quite high to me. Despite a plethora of non-comparable outcomes in cost-effectiveness studies of HIV public health interventions other studies have reported costs per cases averted an order of magnitude lower than this. The conclusions seems to be then that the idea works well – it’s just too costly to be of much use.
Monitoring equity in universal health coverage with essential services for neglected tropical diseases: an analysis of data reported for five diseases in 123 countries over 9 years. The Lancet: Global Health. [PubMed] Published July 2018.
Universal health coverage (UHC) is one the key parts of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3, good health and well-being. The text of the SDG identifies UHC as being about access to services – but this word “access” in the context of health care is often vague and nebulous. Many people mistakenly treat access to health services as synonymous with use of health services, but having access to something is not dependent on whether you actually use it or not. Barriers to a person’s ability to use health care for a given complaint are numerous: financial cost, time cost, lack of education, language barrier, and so forth. It is therefore difficult to quantify and measure access. Hogan and co-authors proposed an index to quantify and monitor UHC across the world that was derived from a number of proxies such as women with four or more antenatal visits, children with vaccines, blood pressure, and health worker density. Their work is useful but of course flawed – these proxies all capture something different, either access, use, or health outcomes – and it is unclear that they are all sensitive to the same underlying construct. Needless to say, we should still be able to diagnose access issues from some combination of these data. This article extends the work of Hogan et al to look at neglected tropical diseases, which affect over 1.5 billion, yet which are, obviously, neglected. The paper uses ‘preventative chemotherapy coverage’ as its key measure, which is the proportion of those needed the chemotherapy who actually receive it. This is a measure of use and not access (although they should be related), for example, there may be near universal availability of the chemotherapy, but various factors on the demand side limiting use. Needless to say, the measure should still be a useful diagnostic tool and it is interesting to see how much worse countries perform on this metric for neglected tropical diseases than general health care.
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