A Systematic Review of Health Economics Research on the Treatment of Liver Cancer in China

Objective: To systematically evaluate the health economics research status of the treatment of liver cancer in Chinese groups. Methods: Taking "China", "liver cancer", "treatment" and "health economics evaluation" as the theme headings, the computer searched CNKI, WanFang data, VIP, PubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library and Web of Science to collect health economics research literature on the treatment of liver cancer in China, and the search period was all established until October 1, 2022. Two review authors independently selected studies for inclusion based on screening criteria; The risk of bias of each study was evaluated, and the research objects, evaluation models, evaluation methods, research perspectives, etc. were qualitatively analyzed; For comparison, medical costs are converted and discounted at a discount rate of 5% to the RMB level in 2021; For studies that evaluated the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER), further statistics were performed to analyze whether it had a cost effect. Results: A total of 28 studies were included, including 14 Chinese and 14 English studies. 60.7% of the study subjects were patients with intermediate and advanced liver cancer, 32.1% were patients with early and intermediate liver cancer, 7.1% were not limited to staging, and 10.7% of the studies evaluated the traditional Chinese medicine program. 92.9% of studies used cost-effect analysis and 7.1% used least-cost analysis; 46.4% (13/28) of studies used the Markov model, 7.1% used the partition survival model, and 46.4% did not establish an economic model; In the study reporting ICER, the median incremental cost was ¥211,611.07, the median ICER was ¥554,915.14, and the median quality-adjusted life years were 0.875 QALYs. Conclusion: At present, the treatment of liver cancer in China is mainly surgery, intervention, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and there are still limitations of less consideration of indirect medical costs, and the evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine programs may be a hot research direction.