title: [A review of health economic assessment for liver transplantation--toward social acceptance of liver transplantation in Japan].
abstract: This paper reviews the literature on health economics assessment (HEA) for liver transplantation (LT) in Europe and USA, and considers prospects in Japan where HEA is currently rarely performed. LT is one of the most expensive health technologies but the health outcome is generally good. It provides the only well-established treatment for end-stage liver disease (ESLD) in the Western world, while in Japan it has yet to be fully implemented because public acceptance is still very low. MEDLINE and Japana Centra Revuo Medicina WEB version Ver. 2 (JCRM2) were systematically used for the literature search. As a result, 6 original papers in Europe and USA that employed accurate methods for HEA were identified through MEDLINE, indicating that LT is cost-effective on long term follow-up. In Japan, however, only one study could be good which tried to estimate it's cost-effectiveness, and the methodology was different from that used in Europe and USA. Through accurate HEA for LT in Japan, we hope that this procedure may become a well-accepted health technology in the future.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health for Senior Citizens, Hokkaido University Graduate School of Medicine.
authors.forename: Kozo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ishida
authors.forename: Hirohisa
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Imai
authors.forename: Katsuhiko
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ogasawara
authors.forename: Hidehiko
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Tamashiro
mesh_terms: D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D005060:Europe; D017048:Health Care Costs; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D016031:Liver Transplantation / Q000191:economics* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010342:Patient Acceptance of Health Care; D013673:Technology Assessment, Biomedical / Q000191:economics*; D013675:Technology, High-Cost