Loading...
Standard treatment for hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is at least 24 weeks of peginterferon plus ribavirin, with the exact duration dependent on genotype. Recent study results suggest that patients who achieve rapid virologic responses (RVRs; i.e., undetectable viral load at 4 weeks) can be treated for shorter durations without sacrificing efficacy or quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), but is this approach cost-effective?
To address this question, researchers constructed a hypothetical cohort of HCV-positive men (age, 45) without cirrhosis or hepatocellular carcinoma. They then used Markov modeling to compare the lifetime (up to age 75) costs and QALYs associated with two different treatment protocols:
Standard protocol: Peginterferon al…