A non-stationary Markov model for economic evaluation of grass pollen allergoid immunotherapy

Massimo Bilancia, Giuseppe Pasculli and Danilo Di Bona

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 5, 1-33

Abstract: Introduction: Allergic rhino-conjunctivitis (ARC) is an IgE-mediated disease that occurs after exposure to indoor or outdoor allergens, or to non-specific triggers. Effective treatment options for seasonal ARC are available, but the economic aspects and burden of these therapies are not of secondary importance, also considered that the prevalence of ARC has been estimated at 23% in Europe. For these reasons, we propose a novel flexible cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) model, intended to provide healthcare professionals and policymakers with useful information aimed at cost-effective interventions for grass-pollen induced allergic rhino-conjunctivitis (ARC). Methods: Treatments compared are: 1. no AIT, first-line symptomatic drug-therapy with no allergoid immunotherapy (AIT). 2. SCIT, subcutaneous immunotherapy. 3. SLIT, sublingual immunotherapy. The proposed model is a non-stationary Markovian model, that is flexible enough to reflect those treatment-related problems often encountered in real-life and clinical practice, but that cannot be adequately represented in randomized clinical trials (RCTs). At the same time, we described in detail all the structural elements of the model as well as its input parameters, in order to minimize any issue of transparency and facilitate the reproducibility and circulation of the results among researchers. Results: Using the no AIT strategy as a comparator, and the Incremental Cost Effectiveness Ratio (ICER) as a statistic to summarize the cost-effectiveness of a health care intervention, we could conclude that: Conclusions: Even though there is a considerable evidence that SCIT outperforms SLIT, we could not state that both SCIT and SLIT (or only one of these two) can be considered cost-effective for ARC, as a reliable threshold value for cost-effectiveness set by national regulatory agencies for pharmaceutical products is missing. Moreover, the impact of model input parameters uncertainty on the reliability of our conclusions needs to be investigated further.

Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0232753

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0232753

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