Economic Costs of Attrition in Clinical Trials

Abstract

Conventional analyses of the cost-effectiveness of preventive regimens fail to account for the impact of attrition on reported costs. Using an economic model in which costs are allocated to fixed and variable components, and data from a recently completed clinical field trial, costs per participant are shown to vary with the rate of attrition. That this variation is usually obscured in reported studies results from methods conventionally used to measure the participants in calculating average costs. This paper proposes a method for resolving this dilemma by allocating costs among the number of beneficiaries in terms of resource utilization.