Utility Losses
Persons without hepatitis C experienced a background
QALY that decreased as patients aged to account for the
prevalence of other health conditions (57). For people with
HCV, we collected utility losses from 5 empirical studies
for 7 hepatitis C disease states: SVR, METAVIR 0 to 1,
METAVIR 2 to 3, compensated cirrhosis, DCC, HCC,
and post–liver transplantation cirrhosis (58–62). We standardized results for each study by dividing the observed
QALY value for each HCV state by the QALY value for
the no-HCV state. We multiplied the mean of the standardized
values for each HCV state by the background QALY of the patient with disease. For patients receiving antiviral therapy, we again multiplied the patient’s QALY value by 0.88 for patients with genotype 1 and by 0.97 for patients with genotype 2 (26).