Cost-effectiveness of Surgery in the Management of Metastatic Epidural Spinal Cord Compression
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Brief Study Design. Systematic review. Objective. To perform an evidence-based synthesis of the literature to examine the cost-effectiveness of surgery in the management of metastatic epidural spinal cord compression (MESCC). Summary of Background Data. Between 2.5% and 10% of patients with cancer develop symptomatic MESCC, which leads to significant morbidity, and a reduction in quality and length of life. Although surgery is being increasingly used in the management of MESCC, it is unclear whether this modality is cost-effective, given the relatively limited lifespan of these patients. Methods. Numerous databases were searched to identify full economic studies based on key questions established a priori. Only economic studies that evaluated and synthesized the costs and consequences (i.e., cost-minimization, cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, or cost-utility) were considered for inclusion. Two independent reviewers examined the full text of the articles meeting inclusion criteria to obtain the final cohort of included studies. The Quality of Health Economic Studies instrument was scored by 2 independent reviewers. Results. The search strategy yielded 38 potentially relevant citations, 2 of which met the inclusion criteria. One was a cost-utility study and the other was a cost-effectiveness study, and both used clinical data from the same randomized controlled trial. Both studies found surgery plus radiotherapy to be not only more expensive but also more effective than radiotherapy alone in the management of patients with MESCC. Conclusion. There is evidence from 2 high-quality studies that surgery plus radiotherapy is costlier but clinically more effective than radiotherapy alone for the management of MESCC. Of note, cost-effectiveness data for the role of spinal stabilization in the management of oncological spinal instability are lacking. This is a key knowledge gap that represents an opportunity for future research. Although the evidence suggests that decompressive spinal surgery followed by radiotherapy is more effective but costlier than radiotherapy alone, we recommend caution in interpreting economic evaluation results in metastatic epidural spinal cord compression. Further economic evaluation data are needed, especially with regard to spinal stabilization for oncological spinal instability.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".