WEDNESDAY, Aug. 5 (HealthDay News) -- In cardiac arrest survivors who meet certain criteria, therapeutic hypothermia induced with a cooling blanket improves clinical outcomes and is as cost-effective as many accepted health care interventions, according to a study published online Aug 4 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.
Raina M. Merchant, M.D., of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and colleagues developed a decision model to capture costs and outcomes for patients who had out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and received either conventional care or therapeutic hypothermia induced with a cooling blanket. The researchers assumed that the patients met Hypothermia After Cardiac Arrest inclusion criteria.
The researchers found that patients who received therapeutic hypothermia gained an average of 0.66 quality-adjusted life years compared with those who received conventional care. This gain carried an incremental cost of $31,254, resulting in an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of $47,168 per quality-adjusted life year. Even when extreme cost estimates were used, the authors note that the cost-effectiveness of hypothermia was less than $100,000 per quality-adjusted life year.
"Even if a hospital had only one patient eligible for hypothermia therapy annually, and considerable post-resuscitation care costs were accrued by survivors, the cost-effectiveness of hypothermia would remain less than $100,000 per quality-adjusted life year," the authors write. "This level of cost-effectiveness is consistent with many widely accepted health care interventions and is considerably lower than some other estimates of U.S. societal willingness-to-pay for health care."
Several authors reported financial ties to medical and pharmaceutical companies, and one co-author is involved with hypothermia induction patents and has equity and royalties in Cold Core Therapeutics, which is developing cooling technologies.
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