Lung Cancer
Lung Cancer
4 years ago

Estimation of loss of quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) for patients with operable versus inoperable lung cancer: Adjusting quality-of-life and lead-time bias for utility of surgery

This study attempts to quantify the difference in loss of quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) for patients with operable and inoperable non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Patients and methods A cohort consisting of 1652 pathologically verified NSCLC patients with performance status 0–1 was monitored for 7 years (2005–2011) to obtain the survival function. This was further extrapolated to lifetime, based on the survival ratios between patients and age- and sex-matched referents simulated from the life tables of the National Vital Statistics of Taiwan. Between 2011 and 2012, EuroQol 5-dimension questionnaires were used to prospectively measure the quality-of-life (QoL) of a 518 consecutive, cross-sectional subsample. We adjusted the lifetime survival function by the utility values of QoL for the cancer cohort to obtain the QALE, while that for the age and sex-matched referents were adjusted to the values collected from the 2009 National Health Interview Survey, and the difference between them was the loss-of-QALE. Results The QALE for patients with operable and inoperable NSCLC were 11.66±0.18 and 1.43±0.05 quality-adjusted life year (QALY), with the corresponding loss-of-QALE of 5.25±0.18 and 14.24±0.05 QALY, respectively. The lifetime utility difference for patients with operable and inoperable NSCLC was 9.00±0.18 QALY, after adjustment for QoL and lead-time bias. Conclusion The utility gained from surgical operation for operable lung cancer is substantial, even after adjustment for lead-time bias. Future studies should compare screening programs with treatment strategies when carrying out cost-utility assessments to improve patients’ values.

Publisher URL: www.sciencedirect.com/science

DOI: S0169500214003481

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.