Is nutritional supplementation for AMD cost-effective?

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Overall, NICE has three main functions:

As well as clinical appraisal of new technologies, NICE also sets out to ensure value for money for the NHS. Its stated aim is to prioritise, rather than ration, and it is primarily concerned with the appropriate allocation of available resources. To this end, economic evaluations of health technologies are carried out alongside clinical evaluations.

Economic evaluation can be conducted from various perspectives, and although the identification and measurement of various costs is similar across the board, the methods by which consequences of health technologies are measured and valued can vary. A cost-effectiveness analysis would involve comparing health technologies in terms of cost per unit clinical outcome, for example unit change in systemic blood pressure, or mortality.3 A cost-benefit analysis, however, would measure both costs and consequences of the health technology in monetary terms, and compares 'doing something' with 'doing nothing' rather than comparing two methods of dealing with the same health issue.4 The cost-benefit analysis also attempts to value the wider benefits of a health technology, in other words, those that do not directly relate to the technology itself. For example, the reduction in time that a family member spends supporting a patient following cataract surgery. In this way, the cost-benefit analysis is based in welfare theory, and has a societal perspective.