Medical or Surgical Therapy for Erosive Reflux Esophagitis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To compare the cost and utility of healing and maintenance regimens of omeprazole and laparoscopic Nissen fundoplication (LNF) in the framework of the Canadian medical system. SUMMARY BACKGROUND DATA: Medical therapy with proton pump inhibitors for endoscopically proven reflux esophagitis is a safe and effective treatment option. Of late, the surgical treatment of choice for this disease has become LNF. METHODS: The authors' base case was a 45-year-old man with erosive reflux esophagitis refractory to H2-blockers. A cost-utility analysis was performed comparing the two strategies. A two-stage Markov model (healing and maintenance phases) was used to estimate costs and utilities with a time horizon of 5 years. Discounted direct costs were estimated from the perspective of a provincial health ministry, and discounted quality-of-life estimates were derived from the medical literature. Sensitivity analyses were performed to test the robustness of the model to the authors' assumptions and to determine thresholds. A Monte Carlo simulation of 10,000 patients was used to estimate variances and 95% interpercentile ranges. RESULTS: For the 5-year period studied, LNF was less expensive than omeprazole (3519.89 dollars vs. 5464.87 dollars per patient) and became the more cost-effective option at 3.3 years of follow-up. The authors found that 20 mg/day omeprazole would have to cost less than 38.60 dollars per month before medical therapy became cost effective; conversely, the cost of LNF would have to be more than 5,273.70 dollars or the length of stay more than 4.2 days for medical therapy to be cost effective. Estimates of quality-adjusted life-years did not differ significantly between the two treatment options, and the incremental cost for medical therapy was 129,665 dollars per quality-adjusted life-years gained. CONCLUSIONS: For patients with severe esophagitis, LNF is a cost-effective alternative to long-term maintenance therapy with proton pump inhibitors.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".