Bias in published cost effectiveness studies: systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To investigate if published studies tend to report favourable cost effectiveness ratios (below 20,000 dollars, 50,000 dollars, and 100,000 dollars per quality adjusted life year (QALY) gained) and evaluate study characteristics associated with this phenomenon. DESIGN: Systematic review. Studies reviewed 494 English language studies measuring health effects in QALYs published up to December 2001 identified using Medline, HealthSTAR, CancerLit, Current Content, and EconLit databases. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Incremental cost effectiveness ratios measured in dollars set to the year of publication. RESULTS: Approximately half the reported incremental cost effectiveness ratios (712 of 1433) were below 20,000 dollars/QALY. Studies funded by industry were more likely to report cost effectiveness ratios below 20,000 dollars/QALY (adjusted odds ratio 2.1, 95% confidence interval 1.3 to 3.3), 50,000 dollars/QALY (3.2, 1.8 to 5.7), and 100,000 dollars/QALY (3.3, 1.6 to 6.8). Studies of higher methodological quality (adjusted odds ratio 0.58, 0.37 to 0.91) and those conducted in Europe (0.59, 0.33 to 1.1) and the United States (0.44, 0.26 to 0.76) rather than elsewhere were less likely to report ratios below 20,000 dollars/QALY. CONCLUSION: Most published analyses report favourable incremental cost effectiveness ratios. Studies funded by industry were more likely to report ratios below the three thresholds. Studies of higher methodological quality and those conducted in Europe and the US rather than elsewhere were less likely to report ratios below 20,000 dollars/QALY.
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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 | 0.110 | 0.058 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.017 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.006 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".