Health Economics in Medical Nutrition: An Emerging Science.

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to describe the applications of health economic theory to medical nutrition. The published literature provides evidence that medical nutrition, e.g. oral nutritional supplements, is an effective treatment for patients with disease related malnutrition. Malnutrition is associated with mortality risk and complication rates, including infections. Malnutrition is not a new problem and with an ageing population it continues to become a major public health concern as increasing age is associated with an increased risk of malnutrition. This overview shows that in the case RCTs are providing the clinical evidence, there is no methodological difference between a cost-effectiveness analysis for pharmaceutical or nutrition. However, in nutrition the evidence may not always come from RCT data, but will be more often based on observational data. Therefore the clinical evidence of nutrition in itself is not the issue, but the handling of clinical evidence from observational studies. As the link between the consumption of a food product and a resulting health status is often more difficult to establish than the effect of a drug treatment it requires the further development of adapted methodologies in order to correctly predict the impact of food-related health effects and health economic outcomes from a broader perspective.