Systematic review of economic evaluations of smoking cessation: standardizing the cost-effectiveness.

OBJECTIVES: This study was performed to render cost-effectiveness studies on smoking cessation therapies, utilized until now, more comparable and more useful for medical decision making. METHODS: The cost-effectiveness ratios reported by the studies were recalculated using a societal perspective and guidelines for economic evaluation. RESULTS: The costs of individual interventions generally increased as a result of the standardization procedure, whereas the effect size decreased. This resulted in increases in the cost-effectiveness ratios for individual studies ranging from 120% to 5600%. CONCLUSIONS: The variation between studies in the percentage increase in cost-effectiveness ratios is huge. This means that not following guidelines when calculating cost-effectiveness ratios can result in large errors. Despite the fact that the standardized cost-effectiveness ratios of smoking interventions were higher than the unstandardized cost-effectiveness ratios, interventions aimed at reducing the prevalence of smoking are cost-effective.