Background: Nedaplatin-based concurrent chemoradiotherapy became an alternative doublet treatment strategy to cisplatin-based concurrent chemoradiotherapy in patients with locoregional, advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma.
Materials and methods: Using a Markov model, we simulated patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma from disease-free to death. Input data for the model were collected from published literature and the standard fee database of West China Hospital. The outcome was expressed in quality-adjusted-years (QALYs), net monetary benefit at the threshold of $25,841, three times the Gross Domestic Product of China in 2017. The costs and benefits were discounted at 3% annually and a half-cycle correction was considered. The input parameters were varied in one-way sensitivity analysis to confirm the robustness of the model. All of the primary analyses used second-order probabilistic sensitivity analysis to capture the impact of parameter uncertainty based on 10,000 Monte-Carlo simulations.
Results: The mean QALYs of treatment in stage II-IVB nasopharyngeal carcinoma were comparable: 2.90 QALYs for nedaplatin and 3.12 QALYs for cisplatin. Nedaplatin cost $34,505 compared with $27,167 for cisplatin, generating an incremental net monetary benefit of nedaplatin versus cisplatin of $-13,357 at the ceiling ratio of $25,841. The results of nedaplatin remained cost-ineffective over the majority of the sensitivity analyses. The cost-effectiveness curve showed that the probability of strategies being cost-effective were 0% for nedaplatin and 100% for cisplatin in stage II-IVB nasopharyngeal carcinoma at any willingness-to-pay threshold.
Conclusions: Nedaplatin is a dominated, cost-ineffective alternative to concurrent chemoradiotherapy in stage II-IVB nasopharyngeal carcinoma compared with cisplatin from the perspective of Chinese society.
Keywords: Chemoradiotherapy; Cost-ineffective; Economic evaluation; Markov model; Nasopharyngeal carcinoma; Nedaplatin.
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