Estimating the health and economic effects of the proposed US Food and Drug Administration voluntary sodium reformulation: Microsimulation cost-effectiveness analysis

Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard, Chris Kypridemos, Brendan Collins, Dariush Mozaffarian, Yue Huang, Piotr Bandosz, Simon Capewell, Laurie Whitsel, Parke Wilde, Martin O’Flaherty and Renata Micha

PLOS Medicine, 2018, vol. 15, issue 4, 1-18

Abstract: Background: Sodium consumption is a modifiable risk factor for higher blood pressure (BP) and cardiovascular disease (CVD). The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has proposed voluntary sodium reduction goals targeting processed and commercially prepared foods. We aimed to quantify the potential health and economic impact of this policy. Methods and findings: We used a microsimulation approach of a close-to-reality synthetic population (US IMPACT Food Policy Model) to estimate CVD deaths and cases prevented or postponed, quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), and cost-effectiveness from 2017 to 2036 of 3 scenarios: (1) optimal, 100% compliance with 10-year reformulation targets; (2) modest, 50% compliance with 10-year reformulation targets; and (3) pessimistic, 100% compliance with 2-year reformulation targets, but with no further progress. We used the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and high-quality meta-analyses to inform model inputs. Costs included government costs to administer and monitor the policy, industry reformulation costs, and CVD-related healthcare, productivity, and informal care costs. Between 2017 and 2036, the optimal reformulation scenario achieving the FDA sodium reduction targets could prevent approximately 450,000 CVD cases (95% uncertainty interval: 240,000 to 740,000), gain approximately 2.1 million discounted QALYs (1.7 million to 2.4 million), and produce discounted cost savings (health savings minus policy costs) of approximately $41 billion ($14 billion to $81 billion). In the modest and pessimistic scenarios, health gains would be 1.1 million and 0.7 million QALYS, with savings of $19 billion and $12 billion, respectively. All the scenarios were estimated with more than 80% probability to be cost-effective (incremental cost/QALY

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002551 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article/fil ... 02551&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pmed00:1002551

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1002551

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS Medicine from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosmedicine ().