. Saeed Husseini Barghazan; . Mohamad Hadian; . Aziz Rezapour; . Setare Nassiri
Volume 12, Issue 5 , June 2022, , Pages 1-10
Abstract
Pregnancy termination and abortion‑related complications are well‑established problems amongwomen at reproductive age and resulted in significant morbidity and mortality. Accordingly, ...
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Pregnancy termination and abortion‑related complications are well‑established problems amongwomen at reproductive age and resulted in significant morbidity and mortality. Accordingly, asystematic study was performed to investigate the economic evaluation studies results on costsand benefits of medical and surgical abortion methods. PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Embase,Cochrane library, ProQuest, and ScienceDirect databases as well as Google scholar were searchedthrough June 2021. Original full‑text English language studies that performed an economic evaluationanalysis comparing medical and surgical methods of pregnancy termination were included in thisreview. A critical quality assessment was conducted utilizing the Consolidated Health EconomicEvaluation Standards checklist. The latest web‑based tool adjusted the estimates of costs expressedin one specific currency and price year into a specific target currency (the year 2020 $US). Overall,538 records were retrieved, and 20 studies were deemed eligible for qualitative synthesis. Amongthe reviewed studies, three studies investigated cost‑minimization analysis, three studies investigatedcost‑utility analysis, and 14 studies investigated cost‑effectiveness analysis. The directly comparisonof medical with surgical abortion was most frequently studied. Medical abortion saved US$ 6 to US$2373 per patient’s costs. Medical abortion was cost‑effective and cost‑saving option in compare tothe surgical abortion across all perspectives (the incremental cost effectiveness ratio ranged fromUS$ 419 to US$ 4,044). Quality scores of included studies ranged from 54% to 100%, and 70% ofstudies received a score of above 85% and had “excellent” quality. According to the results, based onvarious economic and clinical effectiveness decision‑making criteria used in different studies of healtheconomic evaluation, the majority of research provided evidence on the advantage of pharmaceuticalmethods compared to surgical methods, as well as the advantages of using combinations therapycompared to single therapeutic interventions.
