Quality-Adjusted Life Year Proxies for Caries in Primary Dentition: A Discrete Choice Experiment.

Introduction: Cost-utility analysis (CUA)-a method to evaluate intervention cost-effectiveness-transforms benefits of alternatives into a measure of quantity and quality of life, such as quality-adjusted life year (QALY), to enable comparison across heterogeneous programs. Measurement challenges prevent directly estimating utilities and calculating QALYs for caries in primary dentition. Proxy disease QALYs are often used as a substitute; however, there lacks quantitative evidence that these proxy diseases are comparable to caries.