Medical or Surgical Therapy for Erosive Reflux Esophagitis: Cost–Utility Analysis Using a Markov Model
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 H(2)-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 qual-ity-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 vs. $5464.87 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 per month before medical therapy became cost effective; conversely, the cost of LNF would have to be more than $5,273.70 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 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.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.014 | 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".