Objective: To assess the cost-effectiveness of the sentinel node biopsy with lymphadenectomy for nodal metastases (SNB) in patients with primary cutaneous melanoma (CM) of different Breslow thickness (intermediate, thick, thin).
Methods: Decision tree models were constructed to compare two different strategies of management of patients with CM, wide excision of the primary lesion and SNB and wide excision only (WE). Tree models were created for every Breslow thickness over 1-, 5- and 10-year time horizons. Mean and total direct healthcare costs, life years saved (LYSs), quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), cost effectiveness ratio (CER), and incremental cost effectiveness ratio (ICER) were estimated. Every model was considered as a base case, and its results tested with sensitivity analyses.
Results: Base case analyses showed that the best results were obtained for intermediate CM over 10-year time horizon. In this case, ICER for SNB was 130,508€/QALY, well over the threshold of acceptance (30,000€/QALY). In patients with intermediate CM over 1 and 5 years, and for those with thick and thin CM at any time horizon, negative ICER values were estimated since SNB was proved to be more expensive and less effective than WE. Sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of our results.
Conclusions: SNB caused no improvement in health outcomes in terms of LYSs and QALYs in patients with thick and thin CM, and only a slight benefit in those with intermediate CM. WE was more cost-effective compared with SNB for any CM thickness over any time horizon up to 10 years.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
---|---|
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.suronc.2016.05.020 | DOI Listing |
Background: Risk-based analyses are increasingly popular for understanding heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) in clinical trials. For time-to-event analyses, the assumption that high-risk patients benefit most on the clinically important absolute scale when hazard ratios (HRs) are constant across risk strata might not hold. Absolute treatment effects can be measured as either the risk difference (RD) at a given time point or the difference in restricted mean survival time (ΔRMST) which aligns more closely with utilitarian medical decision-making frameworks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRMD Open
January 2025
Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of death in ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV). Screening and primary cardiovascular prevention may improve outcomes.
Methods: We identified patients in the 2002-2019 Mass General Brigham AAV cohort with thoracic CT scans obtained for other clinical purposes.
J Inherit Metab Dis
January 2025
Department of Pediatrics, Medical School, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
Mucopolysaccharidosis type I (MPS I) is an inherited lysosomal storage disorder leading to deleterious brain effects. While animal models suggested that MPS I severely affects white matter (WM), whole-brain diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) analysis was not performed due to MPS-related morphological abnormalities. 3T DTI data from 28 severe (MPS IH, treated with hematopoietic stem cell transplantation-HSCT), 16 attenuated MPS I patients (MPS IA) enrolled under the study protocol NCT01870375, and 27 healthy controls (HC) were analyzed using the free-water correction (FWC) method to resolve macrostructural partial volume effects and unravel differences in DTI metrics accounting for microstructural abnormalities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiabetes Technol Ther
January 2025
Children's Mercy Kansas City, Endocrinology, Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
To use electronic health record (EHR) data to develop a scalable and transferrable model to predict 6-month risk for diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA)-related hospitalization or emergency care in youth with type 1 diabetes (T1D). To achieve a sharable predictive model, we engineered features using EHR data mapped to the T1D Exchange Quality Improvement Collaborative's (T1DX-QI) data schema used by 60+ U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFood Environ Virol
January 2025
School of Environmental and Natural Sciences, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2UW, UK.
Capsid Integrity qPCR (CI-qPCR) assays offer a promising alternative to cell culture-based infectivity assays for assessing pathogenic human virus viability in wastewater. This study compared three CI-qPCR methods: two novel (Crosslinker, TruTiter) and one established (PMAxx dye). These methods were evaluated on heat-inactivated and non-heat-inactivated 'live' viruses spiked into phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) and wastewater, as well as on viruses naturally present in wastewater samples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!