Health economic evaluation of different treatment strategies for peripheral entrapment mononeuropathies: a systematic review

Abstract

Introduction: In this era of cost-conscious health systems, it is of utmost importance to identify and establish the most cost-effective treatment option. However, in the case of peripheral entrapment mononeuropathies there is alack of data regarding economically effective treatment strategies. Therefore, the objective was to conduct an economic evaluation including both costs and benefits of various treatment strategies applied to peripheral entrapment mononeuropathies to estimate the relative cost-effective treatment regimens. Areas covered: Over the 19 years, seven excellent-high quality economic evaluations of three types of peripheral entrapment mononeuropathies were identified in four countries. Our findings showed that surgery was the most cost-effective therapy followed by same cost efficacy of infiltrative therapy and conservative therapy for peripheral entrapment mononeuropathies. However, the fact that surgery was the most common comparator (n = 6) in our selected studies cannot be neglected. Expert opinion: Due to huge methodological variability, the finding of surgery as the cost-effective treatment strategy remains tentative and the decision about the most suitable clinical and costeffective therapy should be individualized from case to case. Moreover, the economic evaluation of all possible treatment strategies for peripheral entrapment mononeuropathies over alonger period of analysis is required in future studies