Cost-Effectiveness Analysis for Disease Prevention -- A Case Study on Colorectal Cancer Screening

TL;DR

This study develops a causal, multi-state modeling approach to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of colorectal cancer screening, providing empirical evidence that starting at age 50 maximizes health benefits at acceptable costs.

Contribution

It introduces a unified measure and causal analysis framework for cost-effectiveness of screening initiation age using large-scale observational data.

Findings

Starting screening at age 50 yields the highest quality-adjusted life years.

Screening at age 50 has an acceptable incremental cost-effectiveness ratio.

Empirical evidence supports screening recommendations at age 50.

Abstract

Cancer Screening has been widely recognized as an effective strategy for preventing the disease. Despite its effectiveness, determining when to start screening is complicated, because starting too early increases the number of screenings over lifetime and thus costs but starting too late may miss the cancer that could have been prevented. Therefore, to make an informed recommendation on the age to start screening, it is necessary to conduct cost-effectiveness analysis to assess the gain in life years relative to the cost of screenings. As more large-scale observational studies become accessible, there is growing interest in evaluating cost-effectiveness based on empirical evidence. In this paper, we propose a unified measure for evaluating cost-effectiveness and a causal analysis for the continuous intervention of screening initiation age, under the multi-state modeling with semi-competing risks. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed estimators perform well in realistic scenarios. We perform a cost-effectiveness analysis of the colorectal cancer screening, utilizing data from the large-scale Women's Health Initiative. Our analysis reveals that initiating screening at age 50 years yields the highest quality-adjusted life years with an acceptable incremental cost-effectiveness ratio compared to no screening, providing real-world evidence in support of screening recommendation for colorectal cancer.