Cost-utility of risperidone compared with standard conventional antipsychotics in chronic schizophrenia

SUMMARY

The high costs and the efficacy of risperidone warrant a systematic pharmacoeconomic evaluation in order to assess its relative cost-utility. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the costs and utilities of treatment in chronic schizophrenia. To achieve this, a cost-utility analysis, which compared risperidone to haloperidol and two depot antipsychotics: haloperidol decanoate and fluphenazine decanoate was conducted. A deterministic decision analysis was used to model chronic schizophrenia over one year. Probabilities were obtained from clinical trials for each medication that were combined using a random effects single arm meta-analysis. Utility values for different health states were obtained by patient interview. A government payer perspective was adopted for this analysis.

The study results demonstrate that risperidone is a dominant therapy in this baseline analysis since it is associated with the lowest overall cost and highest number of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs). Compared with haloperidol, risperidone might save $6,510 (CAN$) per year while producing 0.04 more QALYs per average patient.