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Abstract
Background:
There has been a growth in the number of economic evaluations in the literature, reporting important differences in their designs and results for a particular health technology. Previous research has shown systematic differences among incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) conclusions in industry-sponsored evaluations. Since ICERs are used for reimbursement decisions, exploring these differences may improve healthcare decision-making.Biological treatments for asthma have been extensively evaluated, and vast differences in the cost-effectiveness of the same drug have been reported. Therefore, studying these differences could serve as a base-case scenario to better understand differences in CEA.
Objectives:
To describe the methodological characteristics of the CEA of treatment with biologics for severe asthma and assess their methodological limitations. Furthermore, we will evaluate the association between methodological characteristics and ICERs in these studies.Methods:
We will include CEA of omalizumab, mepolizumab, reslizumab, dupilumab, benralizumab, and tezepelumab, compared with the standard of care in adults diagnosed with severe asthma, that report ICERs as the primary outcome. We developed a search strategy for Medline and Embase. We will assess included studies with the consensus on the health economics criteria checklist (CHEC) for trial-based studies and ISPOR/ISMD checklist for studies using models. We will use regression analysis to examine the association between study characteristics (e.g., methodological quality) with the ICER and the cost-effectiveness conclusion (cost-effective or not).Expected