Economic Evaluations of Pharmacologic Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder: A Systematic Literature Review
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Highlights
•There is new evidence on buprenorphine and strengthened evidence on methadone, indicating that both are economically advantageous treatments for opioid use disorder compared with no pharmacotherapy.
•Approximately half of the recent cost-effectiveness studies used a generic preference-based measure of effectiveness (ie, quality-adjusted life-years or disability-adjusted life-years), limiting broad comparison across diseases/disorders because quality-adjusted life-years or disability-adjusted life-years are the only health economic effectiveness measures with commonly accepted value thresholds. There is wide variation in disease/disorder-specific measures, thereby limiting comparisons within the substance use disorder literature.
•More economic evidence is needed on injectable naltrexone and novel treatment-delivery modalities.