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Alastair Canaway’s journal round-up for 28th May 2018

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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.

Information, education, and health behaviours: evidence from the MMR vaccine autism controversy. Health Economics [PubMed] Published 2nd May 2018

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published (in the Lancet) his infamous and later retracted research purportedly linking the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. Despite the thorough debunking and exposure of academic skulduggery, a noxious cloud of misinformation remained in the public mind, particularly in the US. This study examined several facets of the MMR fake news including: what impact did this have on vaccine uptake in the US (both MMR and other vaccines); how did state level variation in media coverage impact uptake; and what role did education play in subsequent decisions about whether to vaccinate or not. This study harnessed the National Immunization Survey from 1995 to 2006 to answer these questions. This is a yearly dataset of over 200,000 children aged between 19 to 35 months with detailed information on not just immunisation, but also maternal education, income and other sociodemographics. The NewsLibrary database was used to identify stories published in national and state media relating to vaccines and autism. Various regression methods were implemented to examine these data. The paper found that, unsurprisingly, for the year following the Wakefield publication the MMR vaccine take-up declined by between 1.1%-1.5% (notably less than 3% in the UK), likewise this fall in take-up spilled over into other vaccines take-up. The most interesting finding related to education: MMR take-up for children of college-educated mothers declined significantly compared to those without a degree. This can be explained by the education gradient where more-educated individuals absorb and respond to health information more quickly. However, in the US, this continued for many years beyond 2003 despite proliferation of research refuting the autism-MMR link. This contrasts to the UK where educational link closed soon after the findings were refuted, that is, in the UK, the educated responded to the new information refuting the MMR-Autism link. In the US, despite the research being debunked, MMR uptake was lower in the children of those with higher levels of education for many more years. The author speculates that this contrast to the UK may be a result of the media influencing parents’ decisions. Whilst the media buzz in the UK peaked in 2002, it had largely subsided by 2003. In the US however, the media attention was constant, if not increasing till 2006, and so this may have been the reason the link remained within the US. So, we have Andrew Wakefield and arguably fearmongering media to blame for causing a long-term reduction in MMR take-up in the US. Overall, an interesting study leaning on multiple datasets that could be of interest for those working with big data.

Can social care needs and well-being be explained by the EQ-5D? Analysis of the Health Survey for England. Value in Health Published 23rd May 2018

There is increasing discussion about integrating health and social care to provide a more integrated approach to fulfilling health and social care needs. This creates challenges for health economists and decision makers when allocating resources, particularly when comparing benefits from different sectors. NICE itself recognises that the EQ-5D may be inappropriate in some situations. With the likes of ASCOT, ICECAP and WEMWBS frequenting the health economics world this isn’t an unknown issue. To better understand the relationship between health and social care measures, this EuroQol Foundation funded study examined the relationship between social care needs as measured by the Barthel Index, well-being measured using WEMWBS and also the GGH-12, and the EQ-5D as the measure of health. Data was obtained through the Health Survey for England (HSE) and contained 3354 individuals aged over 65 years. Unsurprisingly the authors found that higher health and wellbeing scores were associated with an increased probability of no social care needs. Those who are healthier or at higher levels of wellbeing are less likely to need social care. Of all the instruments, it was the self-care and the pain/discomfort dimensions of the EQ-5D that were most strongly associated with the need for social care. No GHQ-12 dimensions were statistically significant, and for the WEMWBS only the ‘been feeling useful’ and ‘had energy to spare’ were statistically significantly associated with social care need. The authors also investigated various other associations between the measures with many unsurprising findings e.g. EQ-5D anxiety/depression dimension was negatively associated with wellbeing as measured using the GHQ-12. Although the findings are favourable for the EQ-5D in terms of it capturing to some extent social care needs, there is clearly still a gap whereby some outcomes are not necessarily captured. Considering this, the authors suggest that it might be appropriate to strap on an extra dimension to the EQ-5D (known as a ‘bolt on’) to better capture important ‘other’ dimensions, for example, to capture dignity or any other important social care outcomes. Of course, a significant limitation with this paper relates to the measures available in the data. Measures such as ASCOT and ICECAP have been developed and operationalised for economic evaluation with social care in mind, and a comparison against these would have been more informative.

The health benefits of a targeted cash transfer: the UK Winter Fuel Payment. Health Economics [PubMed] [RePEc] Published 9th May 2018

In the UK, each winter is accompanied by an increase in mortality, often known as ‘excess winter mortality’ (EWM). To combat this, the UK introduced the Winter Fuel Payment (WFP), the purpose of the WFP is an unconditional cash transfer to households containing an older person (those most vulnerable to EWM) above the female state pension age with the intent for this to used to help the elderly deal with the cost of keeping their dwelling warm. The purpose of this paper was to examine whether the WFP policy has improved the health of elderly people. The authors use the Health Surveys for England (HSE), the Scottish health Survey (SHeS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate causal effects of the WFP. To measure impact (benefit) they focus on circulatory and respiratory illness as measured by: self-reports of chest infection, nurse measured hypertension, and two blood biomarkers for infection and inflammation. The authors found that for those living in a household receiving the payment there was a 6% point reduction (p<0.01) in the incidence of high levels of serum fibrinogen (biomarker) which are considered to be a marker of current infection and are associated with chronic pulmonary disease. For the other health outcomes, although positive, the estimated effects were less robust and not statistically significant. The authors investigated the impact of increasing the age of eligibility for the WFP (in line with the increase of women’s pension age). Their findings suggest there may be some health cost associated with the increase in age of eligibility for WFP. To surmise, the paper highlights that there may be some health benefits from the receipt of the WFP. What it doesn’t however consider is opportunity cost. With WFP costing about £2 billion per year, as a health economist, I can’t help but wonder if the money could have been better spent through other avenues.

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Alastair Canaway’s journal round-up for 29th January 2018

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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.

Is “end of life” a special case? Connecting Q with survey methods to measure societal support for views on the value of life-extending treatments. Health Economics [PubMed] Published 19th January 2018

Should end-of-life care be treated differently? A question often asked and previously discussed on this blog: findings to date are equivocal. This question is important given NICE’s End-of-Life Guidance for increased QALY thresholds for life-extending interventions, and additionally the Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF). This week’s round-up sees Helen Mason and colleagues attempt to inform the debate around societal support for views of end-of-life care, by trying to determine the degree of support for different views on the value of life-extending treatment. It’s always a treat to see papers grounded in qualitative research in the big health economics journals and this month saw the use of a particularly novel mixed methods approach adding a quantitative element to their previous qualitative findings. They combined the novel (but increasingly recognisable thanks to the Glasgow team) Q methodology with survey techniques to examine the relative strength of views on end-of-life care that they had formulated in a previous Q methodology study. Their previous research had found that there are three prevalent viewpoints on the value of life-extending treatment: 1. ‘a population perspective: value for money, no special cases’, 2. ‘life is precious: valuing life-extension and patient choice’, 3. ‘valuing wider benefits and opportunity cost: the quality of life and death’. This paper used a large Q-based survey design (n=4902) to identify societal support for the three different viewpoints. Viewpoints 1 and 2 were found to be dominant, whilst there was little support for viewpoint 3. The two supported viewpoints are not complimentary: they represent the ethical divide between the utilitarian with a fixed budget (view 1), and the perspective based on entitlement to healthcare (view 2: which implies an expanding healthcare budget in practice). I suspect most health economists will fall into camp number one. In terms of informing decision making, this is very helpful, yet unhelpful: there is no clear answer. It is, however, useful for decision makers in providing evidence to balance the oft-repeated ‘end of life is special’ argument based solely on conjecture, and not evidence (disclosure: I have almost certainly made this argument before). Neither of the dominant viewpoints supports NICE’s End of Life Guidance nor the CDF. Viewpoint 1 suggests end of life interventions should be treated the same as others, whilst viewpoint 2 suggests that treatments should be provided if the patient chooses them; it does not make end of life a special case as this viewpoint believes all treatments should be available if people wish to have them (and we should expand budgets accordingly). Should end of life care be treated differently? Well, it depends on who you ask.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of childhood health utilities. Medical Decision Making [PubMed] Published 7th October 2017

If you’re working on an economic evaluation of an intervention targeting children then you are going to be thankful for this paper. The purpose of the paper was to create a compendium of utility values for childhood conditions. A systematic review was conducted which identified a whopping 26,634 papers after deduplication – sincere sympathy to those who had to do the abstract screening. Following abstract screening, data were extracted for the remaining 272 papers. In total, 3,414 utility values were included when all subgroups were considered – this covered all ICD-10 chapters relevant to child health. When considering only the ‘main study’ samples, 1,191 utility values were recorded and these are helpfully separated by health condition, and methodological characteristics. In short, the authors have successfully built a vast catalogue of child utility values (and distributions) for use in future economic evaluations. They didn’t, however, stop there, they then built on the systematic review results by conducting a meta-analysis to i) estimate health utility decrements for each condition category compared to general population health, and ii) to examine how methodological factors impact child utility values. Interestingly for those conducting research in children, they found that parental proxy values were associated with an overestimation of values. There is a lot to unpack in this paper and a lot of appendices and supplementary materials are included (including the excel database for all 3,414 subsamples of health utilities). I’m sure this will be a valuable resource in future for health economic researchers working in the childhood context. As far as MSc dissertation projects go, this is a very impressive contribution.

Estimating a cost-effectiveness threshold for the Spanish NHS. Health Economics [PubMed] [RePEc] Published 28th December 2017

In the UK, the cost-per-QALY threshold is long-established, although whether it is the ‘correct’ value is fiercely debated. Likewise in Spain, there is a commonly cited threshold value of €30,000 per QALY with a dearth of empirical justification. This paper sought to identify a cost-per-QALY threshold for the Spanish National Health Service (SNHS) by estimating the marginal cost per QALY at which the SNHS currently operates on average. This was achieved by exploiting data on 17 regional health services between the years 2008-2012 when the health budget experienced considerable cuts due to the global economic crisis. This paper uses econometric models based on the provoking work by Claxton et al in the UK (see the full paper if you’re interested in the model specification) to achieve this. Variations between Spanish regions over time allowed the authors to estimate the impact of health spending on outcomes (measured as quality-adjusted life expectancy); this was then translated into a cost-per-QALY value for the SNHS. The headline figures derived from the analysis give a threshold between €22,000 and €25,000 per QALY. This is substantially below the commonly cited threshold of €30,000 per QALY. There are, however (as to be expected) various limitations acknowledged by the authors, which means we should not take this threshold as set in stone. However, unlike the status quo, there is empirical evidence backing this threshold and it should stimulate further research and discussion about whether such a change should be implemented.

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Alastair Canaway’s journal round-up for 27th November 2017

captaincanaway Leave a comment

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.

Elevated mortality among weekend hospital admissions is not associated with adoption of seven day clinical standards. Emergency Medicine Journal [PubMed] Published 8th November 2017

Our esteemed colleagues in Manchester brought more evidence to the seven-day NHS debate (debacle?). Patients who are admitted to hospital in an emergency at weekends have higher mortality rates than those during the week. Despite what our Secretary of State will have you believe, there is an increasing body of evidence suggesting that once case-mix is adequately adjusted for, the ‘weekend effect’ becomes negligible. This paper takes a slightly different angle for examining the same phenomenon. It harnesses the introduction of four priority clinical standards in England, which aim to reduce the number of deaths associated with the weekend effect. These are time to first consultant review; access to diagnostics; access to consultant-directed interventions; and on-going consultant review. The study uses publicly available data on the performance of NHS Trusts in relation to these four priority clinical standards. For the latest financial year (2015/16), Trusts’ weekend effect odds ratios were compared to their achievement against the four clinical standards. Data were available for 123 Trusts. The authors found that adoption of the four clinical standards was not associated with the extent to which mortality was elevated for patients admitted at the weekend. Furthermore, they found no association between the Trusts’ performance against any of the four standards and the magnitude of the weekend effect. The authors offer three reasons as to why this may be the case. First, data quality could be poor, second, it could be that the standards themselves are inadequate for reducing mortality, finally, it could be that the weekend effect in terms of mortality may be the wrong metric by which to judge the benefits of a seven-day service. They note that their previous research demonstrated that the weekend effect is driven by admission volumes at the weekend rather than the number of deaths, so it will not be impacted by care provision, and this is consistent with the findings in this study. The spectre of opportunity cost looms over the implementation of these standards; although no direct harm may arise from the introduction of these standards, resources will be diverted away from potentially more beneficial alternatives, this is a serious concern. The seven-day debate continues.

The effect of level overlap and color coding on attribute non-attendance in discrete choice experiments. Value in Health Published 16th November 2017

I think discrete choice experiments (DCE) are difficult to complete. That may be due to me not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, or it could be due to the nature of DCEs, or a bit of both. For this reason, I like best-worst scaling (BWS). BWS aside, DCEs are a common tool used in health economics research to assess and understand preferences. Given the difficulty of DCEs, people often resort to heuristics, that is, respondents often simplify choice tasks by taking shortcuts, e.g. ignoring one or more attribute (attribute non-attendance) or always selecting the option with the highest level of a certain attribute. This has downstream consequences leading to bias within preference estimates. Furthermore, difficulty with comprehension leads to high attrition rates. This RCT sought to examine whether participant dropout and attribute non-attendance could be reduced through two methods: level overlap, and colour coding. Level overlap refers to the DCE design whereby in each choice task a certain number of attributes are presented with the same level; in different choice tasks different attributes are overlapped. The idea of this is to prevent dominant attribute strategies whereby participants always choose the option with the highest level of one specific attribute and forces them to evaluate all attributes. The second method involves colour coding and the provision of other visual cues to reduce task complexity, e.g. colour coding levels to make it easy to see which levels are equal. There were five trial arms. The control arm featured no colour coding and no attribute overlap. The other four arms featured either colour coding (two different types were tested), attribute overlap, or a combination of them both. A nationally (Dutch) representative sample in relation to age, gender, education and geographic region were recruited online. In total 3394 respondents were recruited and each arm contained over 500 respondents. Familiarisation and warm-up questions were followed by 21 pairwise choice tasks in a randomised order. For the control arm (no overlap, no colour coding) 13.9% dropped out whilst only attending to on average 2.1 out of the five attributes. Colour coding reduced this to 9.6% with 2.8 attributes being attended. Combining level overlap with intensity colour coding reduced drop out further to 7.2% whilst increasing attribute attendance to four out of five. Thus, the combination of level overlap and colour coding nearly halved the dropout and doubled the attribute attendance within the DCE task. An additional, and perhaps most important benefit of the improvement in attribute attendance is that it reduces the need to model for potential attribute non-attendance post-hoc. Given the difficult of DCE completion, it seems colour coding in combination with level overlap should be implored for future DCE tasks.

Evidence on the longitudinal construct validity of major generic and utility measures of health-related quality of life in teens with depression. Quality of Life Research [PubMed] Published 17th November 2017

There appears to be increasing recognition of the prevalence and seriousness of youth mental health problems. Nearly 20% of young people will suffer depression during their adolescent years. To facilitate cost-utility analysis it is necessary to have a measure of preference based health-related quality of life (HRQL). However, there are few measures designed for use in adolescents. This study sought to examine various existing HRQL measures in relation to their responsiveness for the evaluation of interventions targeting depression in young people. This builds on previous work conducted by Brazier et al that found the EQ-5D and SF-6D performed adequately for depression in adults. In total 392 adolescents aged between 13 and 17 years joined the study, 376 of these completed follow up assessments. Assessments were taken at baseline and 12 weeks. The justification for 12 weeks is that it represented the modal time to clinical change. The following utility instruments were included: the HUI suite, the EQ-5D-3L, Quality of Well-Being Scale (QWB), and the SF-6D (derived from SF-36). Other non-preference based HRQL measures were also included: disease-specific ratings and scales, and the PedsQL 4.0. All (yes, you read that correctly) measures were found to be responsive to change in depression symptomology over the 12-week follow up period and each of the multi-attribute utility instruments was able to detect clinically meaningful change. In terms of comparing the utility instruments, the HUI-3, the QWB and the SF-6D were the most responsive whilst the EQ-5D-3L was the least responsive. In summary, any of the utility instruments could be used. One area of disappointment for me was that the CHU-9D was not included within this study – it’s one of the few instruments that has been developed by and for children and would have very much been a worthy addition. Regardless, this is an informative study for those of us working within the youth mental health sphere.

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