Monday, October 17, 2011

Cost-effectiveness Evidence on Prevention, Control, and Treatment of NCDs(CONT...)

Cost-effectiveness Evidence on Prevention, Control, and Treatment of NCDs

The majority of studies discussed below looked at one single intervention at a time, comparing it to an alternative of no intervention. Murray et al. (2003) have made an effort to evaluate different combinations of various levels of interventions, primarily through a modeling approach. They examined 17 population-based and individual-based health service interventions or combinations of the two, for 14 WHO subregions (including SEAR-D and SEAR-B).


Population-based interventions included health education through the mass media (focusing on blood pressure, cholesterol concentration, and body mass), and either legislation or voluntary agreements on salt content to ensure appropriate labeling and stepwise decreases in the salt content of processed foods.

Individual-based health-service interventions included detection and treatment of people with high concentrations of cholesterol for two thresholds; treatment of individuals with high systolic blood pressure with two thresholds; treatment of individuals for both these risk factors; and treatment of individuals based on their absolute risk of a cardiovascular event in the next 10 years with four thresholds.

According to Murray et al. (2003), the optimum overall strategy is a combination of the populationbased and individual-based interventions. Interestingly, they find that if resources are extremely scarce, the population-based nonpersonal interventions will be chosen first.

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