Cancer and Hepatocellular Carcinoma
This is an interesting paper that just came out a few months ago in Hepatology, where the authors looked at a comparison between transplant and surgical resection, based on cost-effective analysis. This was based on life expectancy and not quality-adjusted life years. And the authors pointed out that if you accepted a cost per life year increase between $34,000 and $184,000, which seems a bit high, but accepting perhaps a value under $100,000 here at six months, then any patient who cannot reasonably be transplanted within six months of discovery of their tumor probably, from a cost-effective basis at least, would be a better candidate for surgical resection. Of course studies like this have a great number of assumptions. This is an interesting paper but I’m not sure we can draw too many fast conclusions from it.