The Economic Impact of Epoetin Alfa Therapy on Delaying Time to Dialysis in Elderly Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of epoetin alfa (EPO) therapy on delaying progression to renal dialysis and quantify the associated medical cost savings in elderly chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients. Elderly (>/=65 years) dialysis patients who had >/=1 hemoglobin (Hb) value and >/=1 glomerular filtration rate (GFR) value of <60 mL/min/1.73 m(2) were identified using health claims and laboratory data from the period January 1999 to February 2005. Exclusion criteria included: organ transplantation, blood transfusion, use of darbepoetin alfa, and dialysis for reasons other than CKD. Each EPO patient was matched by Hb and GFR to one control patient. The time from when matched patients had the same GFR value to dialysis was compared. The economic impact of EPO on delaying dialysis was monetized using standardized health plan payments, and adjusted to 2005 United States dollars. Sixty-eight patients (34 EPO and 34 matched controls) formed the study population. The average time to dialysis was 156 days longer for the EPO group compared to the matched control group (p = 0.003). Analysis by CKD severity revealed that EPO therapy in less severe CKD patients offered a greater delay in time to dialysis (Stage 4: 213 days difference, p = 0.003; Stage 5: 104 days difference, p = 0.160). EPO treatment resulted in cost savings of $43,374-$59,222 per patient compared to non-EPO matched controls. This retrospective matched cohort study suggests that EPO therapy has a beneficial impact on delaying progression to dialysis in elderly CKD patients, especially in those with less severe CKD.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".