A Cost-Utility Analysis of Nonsurgical Treatments for Stress Urinary Incontinence in Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to perform a cost-utility analysis of nonsurgical treatments for stress urinary incontinence (SUI) in healthy adult women with a health system perspective over a 1-year time horizon. METHODS: A decision tree model was constructed to evaluate the following nonsurgical treatment options for SUI in a simulated healthy adult female cohort who had failed Kegel exercises: pelvic floor muscle therapy (PFMT), a disposable tampon device (Impressa), a self-fitting intravaginal incontinence device (Uresta), and a traditional incontinence pessary. Published data and consultation with health care providers were used to estimate efficacies and costs. Health utility estimates were derived from existing literature. Deterministic sensitivity analyses were performed as well as Monte Carlo probabilistic sensitivity analysis to account for the impact of parameter uncertainty on costs and efficacies for each treatment. Our primary outcome was the highest net monetary benefit (NMB), which represents the monetary value of the health benefits less the treatment costs. The standard willingness-to-pay threshold of US $50,000 per quality-adjusted life year was used. RESULTS: The utility of SUI in an otherwise healthy patient was 0.81 ± 0.16 and for subjective cure was 0.93 ± 0.08. Using base-case estimates, PFMT was the most cost-effective treatment with an NMB of US $44,098. The Impressa tampon, Uresta, and traditional pessary had NMBs of US $43,970, $43,785, and $42,846, respectively. The probabilistic sensitivity analysis confirmed PFMT to be the most cost-effective treatment option at a willingness to pay of US $50,000 per quality-adjusted life year. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of our cost-utility analysis favor PFMT as the most cost-effective nonsurgical treatment option for SUI. Cost-effectiveness for 1 year of treatment was also favorable for Impressa and Uresta. In jurisdictions where there is no public funding for PFMT, Impressa or Uresta are alternatives for women wishing to avoid surgery.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".