Cost-effectiveness analysis of acupuncture, counselling and usual care in treating patients with depression: the results of the ACUDep trial

Spackman, E., Richmond, S., Sculpher, M., Bland, M., Brealey, S., Gabe, R., Hopton, A., Keding, A., Lansdown, H., Perren, S., Torgerson, D., Watt, I., & MacPherson, H. · PLOS One · 2014 November

DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0113726

Objective

New evidence on the clinical effectiveness of acupuncture plus usual care (acupuncture) and counselling plus usual care (counselling) for patients with depression suggests the need to investigate the health-related quality of life and costs of these treatments to understand whether they should be considered a good use of limited health resources.

Conclusions

The clinical results of the trails demonstrated that acupuncture and counselling significantly reduced depression measures at 3 and 6 months when compared with routine care. It was also reported to have improvement over the 12 month period. It also further showcase that acupuncture is cost-effective (in the UK) compared with counselling or usual care alone.

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Insights

Acupuncture is cost-effective compared with counselling or usual care alone in treating patients with depression.

The results of this analysis suggest acupuncture is cost-effective compared with counselling or usual care alone. This result is strongly influenced by the cost of acupuncture which only remains cost-effective when the cost of providing the intervention is lower than that of counselling. For patients in whom acupuncture is unavailable and perhaps inappropriate, counselling has an ICER less than a range of estimates of NICE’s cost-effective threshold. However, further research is needed to determine the most cost-effective treatment pathways for depressed patients when the full range of available interventions is considered.