: A combination of two herbal compounds, curcumin and QingDai (CurQD), has recently been proposed as an effective treatment for patients with active ulcerative colitis (UC), based on both randomized controlled and real-world evidence. However, no cost-effectiveness analysis for this nutraceutical is currently available.: A Markov model was generated to simulate the progression of patients with moderate-to-severe UC, by separate analysis for a cohort of advanced therapy-naïve and advanced therapy-experienced patients. Medication costs were derived from the published average wholesale price (AWP) in the US. Efficacy data were modeled by synthesizing efficacy reports from randomized, placebo-controlled trials and real-world cohort studies of all FDA-approved drugs for UC, and each was compared with CurQD. The model employed a 54-week time horizon. A threshold of 50, 000 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) was chosen, and a one-way sensitivity analysis was performed to assess the robustness of the study.: The comparison of CurQD with the FDA-approved advanced therapies for UC yielded an estimated incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of over 200, 000/QALY for all comparisons. Differences ranged from -0. 05 to a slight gain of 0. 07 QALY in bio-experienced patients and from -0. 1 to 0. 04 QALY in bio-naïve patients. The one-way sensitivity analysis proved the robustness of the study.: The present analysis suggests that the markedly reduced cost and demonstrated efficacy of CurQD provide a significant cost-effectiveness benefit over advanced therapies for active UC, including over anti-TNF biosimilars.
Yanai et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
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