Pharmacoeconomics defined

Generalized anxiety disorder has been relatively neglected from the point of view of both health economics and pharmacoeconomics. The changing diagnostic criteria have made it difficult to compare data over time, leading researchers to focus on the more clearly defined disorders such as panic and obsessions. Drug treatment has been dominated by the benzodiazepines, usually available genetically and cheaply. However, as the final section of this chapter will show, all this is in flux. 

Other, more complex terms are defined and described in standard textbooks of epidemiology and statistics (q.v.) and included in two excellent lexicons, the Dictionary of Epidemiology (Last, 2001) and, more recently, a very useful Lexicon from the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR). 

MEDLINE 1965-. Bethesda, MD, U.S.A. National Library of Medicine. Daily. MEDLINE provides specific indexing terms to retrieve pharmacoeconomic information. The descriptor ECONOMICS-PHARMACEUTICAL (MeSH tree number N03-219-390 synonyms pharmaceuticail-economics and pharmacoeconomics) was adopted in 1994 and will retrieve entries as defined in its scope note Economic aspects of the fields of pharmacy and pharmacology as they apply to the development and study of... 

An interest in defining the value of medicine is a common thread that unites today s health care practitioners. With serious concerns aboutrising medication costs and consistent pressure to decrease pharmacy expenditures and budgets, clinicians/prescribers, pharmacists, and other health care professionals must answer the question, What is the value of the pharmaceutical goods and services I provide Pharmacoeconomics, or the discipline of placing a value on drug therapy, has evolved to answer this question. 

Pharmacoeconomics has been defined as the description and analysis of the cost of drug therapy to health care systems and... 

Cost is defined as the value of the resources consumed by a program or drug therapy of interest. Consequence is defined as the effects, outputs, or outcomes of the program of drug therapy of interest. Consideration of both costs and consequences differentiates most pharmacoeconomic evaluation methods from traditional cost-containment strategies and drug-use evaluations. 

A recent pharmacoeconomic analysis to examine the clinical benefits and cost-effectiveness of newer treatments for chronic HCV infection evaluated the incremental cost-effectiveness of using peginterferon-a2b plus ribavirin compared to IFN-a2b plus ribavirin, and monotherapy regimens of both interferons. The incremental cost per quality-adjusted fife year (QALY) saved for combination therapy with peginterferon-a2b compared to standard therapy was 36,000 and 55,000 for men and women with HCV genotype 1, respectively. A QALY is defined as a patient s desire for a year of fife at... 

As the field of pharmacoeconomics grows, and as clinicians and researchers attempt to define the optimal management of patients in our cost-conscious environment, additional examination of the economics of treating patients with lupus will be needed. 

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